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Doritos Are Making Quieter-Crunching Chips For Women, And People Can't Handle It

PepsiCo’s CEO said men enjoy licking Dorito dust off their fingers with “great glee,” but women don’t. Oh, and that women “don’t like to crunch too loudly in public.”

The idea that women are dainty about eating snacks has put a bad taste in a lot of people’s mouths — and made them eager to poke fun at the concept of chips designed for women.

Last week, PepsiCo’s CEO Indra Nooyi discussed women’s supposedly meek snack-consuming habits in a Freakonomics interview.

The show’s host, Stephen Dubner, observed, “I understand that men and women eat chips very differently” and asked Nooyi to describe the difference.

She gave an example using Doritos, one of PepsiCo’s products. According to Nooyi, men enjoy licking Dorito dust off their fingers with “great glee,” and when they’re done with a bag, they enjoy dumping the “little broken pieces” from the bottom into their mouths.

But Nooyi suggested women are way too refined or self-conscious to eat Doritos that way.

“Women would love to do the same, but they don’t,” Nooyi said. “They don’t like to crunch too loudly in public. And they don’t lick their fingers generously and they don’t like to pour the little broken pieces and the flavor into their mouth.”

When Freakonomics asked Nooyi if PepsiCo was playing around with the idea of creating “a male and female version of chips,” Nooyi said the company was.

“It’s not a male and female [version] as much as, ‘Are there snacks for women that can be designed and packaged differently?’” Nooyi said. “And yes, we are looking at it, and we’re getting ready to launch a bunch of them soon.”

Though Nooyi did seem to confirm that the company was working on new snack products geared specifically toward women, she never specifically mentioned which brand would make these products or what they would be called. (PepsiCo also owns brands like Lays and Cheetos.) A spokesman for PepsiCo declined to comment to HuffPost about whether the company had conducted research about snack consumption based on gender.

But that didn’t prevent the phrase “Lady Doritos” from trending on Twitter on Monday ― and let’s just say people found the entire idea pretty crummy.

Read the best tweets below.

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