Mehmood Khan has many irons in the fire. As chief executive of PepsiCo’s Global Nutrition Group and chief scientific officer at the giant food and beverage company, he oversees research and development projects around the world. PepsiCo is known for its colas, Doritos, Gatorade and Mountain Dew, but also sells nuts, sunflower seeds, dairy products and hummus. It sells $13 billion a year in “health and wellness” products such as Quaker Oats and Tropicana juices, and wants to build a $30 billion nutrition business by 2020. During a recent visit to Atlanta, hometown of PepsiCo’s top rival, Coca-Cola Co., Khan spoke with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution about research into new salt, beverage sweeteners, bottles made from orange peels, compostable chip bags and “drinkable oats.”
Q: With the new salt PepsiCo is developing, how is the company going to be able to use less but get the same saltiness?
A: Consumers want healthier products, but they don’t want to compromise on taste. It’s not a trade-off consumers want to make. The goal was to make the best-tasting snacks and improve their health profile by lowering the salt content and not compromise on taste. Salt that dissolves faster has a greater chance of you tasting it. Salt is all sodium chloride, but crystals can be different shapes. We wondered if there were different crystal shapes that could dissolve faster. We found different crystals and we tested them to see which of these crystals dissolve faster.
Q: PepsiCo sells Sabra hummus through a joint venture. But I bet you if I asked people to name some sellers of hummus, PepsiCo would never show up.
A: We have some great nutrition-based brands and many consumers don’t recognize them as part of the PepsiCo portfolio. Many business people or analysts don’t equate them with PepsiCo. Quaker Oats, Tropicana, Sabra ... you really cannot innovate in this healthy space until you have diversity of brands. Hummus is part of our ability to innovate with protein. Chickpeas, plant-based protein, complements our dairy protein very well. We have great depth in potatoes and grains. We have great depth in juices, fruits, vegetables. We have depth in nuts, seeds, dairy and lentils. Name me a company that has that portfolio.
Q: Indra Nooyi, PepsiCo’s CEO, has talked about “drinkifying snacks and snackifying drinks.” What does that mean?
A: Traditionally, people have thought of snacks as a solid product and drinks as a liquid product. You think of a bowl of oats as something you eat with a spoon. But Indra has said, why can’t you drink the equivalent of bowl of oats from a bottle? Is it possible to have something convenient and great-tasting, with the soluble fiber content of a bowl of oats with something I can drink on the go? If you consume that in the middle of the afternoon, is that a snack or a beverage? Does it matter? For the consumer, they’re looking for taste, convenience, nourishment. They’re not really distinguishing whether a snack is solid or liquid.
Q: Last year about this time, it seemed like stevia was much in the news as a potential breakthrough sweetener for beverages. Has that changed?
A: Having stevia alone isn’t the solution. Everybody has access to stevia. You can go buy it. It’s knowing how to formulate with it, how to add the other formula ingredients so you can have the taste you want. Nobody’s going to be able to duplicate Trop50 or SoBe Lifewater. I know as a scientist, if there’s stevia out there in nature, there’s probably the next generation of sweeteners waiting to be discovered. So we can’t sit. I would anticipate that the next generation of natural sweeteners will follow stevia.
Q: Tell me about the thinking behind the bottle in development that uses 100 percent plant-based materials, as well as the compostable SunChips bag.
A: [On the bottle] we said, “Look, guys. Here’s your experiment. You can take a pile of orange peels, oat husks and potato peels. Turn it into plastic.” You can do this without dependence on oil. While today I can’t justify it on cost, that’s not the point. Now we can say what is the next generation of packaging. We played with that in the SunChips bag. Yes, some consumers said it was too noisy. But we got the compostability right. And now we have the next generation coming, which is less noisy. Innovation is an iterative process. You learn, you continue to improve, you stay ahead.
