Frito-Lay Frito-Lay Frito-Lay, Inc. is an American subsidiary of PepsiCo that manufactures, markets, and sells corn chips, potato chips, and other snack foods. The primary snack food brands produced under the Frito-Lay name include Fritos corn chips, Cheetos cheese-flavored snacks; Doritos and Tostitos tortilla chips; Lay's and Ruffles potato chips; Rold Gold pretzels; and Walkers potato crisps (in the UK and Ireland). Each brand has generated annual worldwide sales over $1 billion in 2009. Frito-Lay began in the early 1930s as two separate companies, The Frito Company and H.W. Lay & Company, which merged in 1961 to form Frito-Lay, Inc. Four
PepsiCo was perceived by India-based environmental organizations as a company that diverted water to manufacture a discretionary product, making it a target for critics at the time. As a result, in 2003 PepsiCo launched a country-wide program to achieve a "positive water balance" in India by 2009. In 2007, PepsiCo's CEO Indra Nooyi made a trip to India to address water usage practices in the country, prompting prior critic Sunita Narain, director of the Centre for Science & Environment (CSE), to note that PepsiCo "seem(s) to be doing something serious about water now." According to the company's 2009 corporate citizenship report,