PepsiCo looks set to relaunch its better-for-you Walkers sub-brand Sunbites, playing up its nutritional credentials.
It has applied to the Intellectual Property Office to register two logos featuring the name S.U.N, standing for “simple uplifting nutrition”, and a sunshine icon as trademarks. They are classified under categories 29 and 30, covering corn and rice chips.
The activity comes as value sales of Sunbites have soared 33.7% to £18.4m on volumes up 27.8% [NIQ 52 w/e 6 September 2025].
Even so, sales of the wholegrain snacks sub-brand represent just 1.3% of Walkers’ £1.5bn overall value, according to NIQ data [52 w/e 31 December 2024].
PepsiCo had not responded to request for comments by the time of writing.
The supplier reformulated Sunbites in 2023 to make them HFSS-compliant, simultaneously moving them to packs made with 50% recycled plastic.
PepsiCo’s R&D experts ran four trials over six months to find a way to reduce the sugar content in a Sunbites chip by more than half, it said at the time. In the original recipe, sugar was “a bigger contributor to the crunch than the taste”.
At the start of 2025, PepsiCo added a 0.0% alcohol claim to its better-for-you crisps packs – including Sunbites, Baked, Snack a Jacks and Popworks – to position them as “the official snacks of Dry January”.
Walkers’ ambition to capitalise on the “culturally relevant moment” saw it enlist actor Danny Dyer for a digital push set in a pub.
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