A Chilean snack maker, a tobacco group and PepsiCo.

Evercrisp is the name under which PepsiCo has made and sold snacks in Chile for three decades. The company’s own website, in a version archived in December 2003, opened with “Bienvenido a Evercrisp, una empresa PepsiCo” — welcome to Evercrisp, a PepsiCo company — and gave the outline of its history in a single passage: Evercrisp had been present in Chile since 1978, and it was acquired by Frito Lay in 1993, after which, the site said, money was invested to turn it into “the company it is today.” The same page set out its mission as being the favourite “entertaining food” company in Chile. It did not name the people who started the business.

Between those two dates Evercrisp passed through one of Chile’s largest industrial groups. Spanish Wikipedia’s article on British American Tobacco Chile says that in the early 1980s the Compañía Chilena de Tabacos, the country’s main cigarette maker, diversified by buying food businesses, among them Evercrisp, Malloa and Conservas Deyco. In 1985 the tobacco company renamed itself Empresas CCT, at the head of a group that included its cigarette business and Malloa. About a decade later, Spanish Wikipedia says, the holding decided to concentrate on tobacco alone and took the name Chiletabacos; it became British American Tobacco Chile in 2009. The article gives no source for the food purchases, so the early-1980s date rests on Spanish Wikipedia alone.

Evercrisp’s name also appeared in motor racing in those years. In the 1983 season of Formula 2 Codasur, the South American single-seater series, the Chilean driver Juan Carlos Ridolfi raced a Volkswagen-powered Berta carrying sponsorship from Viceroy-Chiletabacos, Full Color, 3M and Evercrisp, and finished the season tenth with 10 points, Spanish Wikipedia records.

Ruffles, Cheetos and the tazos.

Under Frito-Lay, Evercrisp became the umbrella for PepsiCo’s snacks in Chile. The 2003 website said Frito Lay’s presence in the country was represented by three brands — Evercrisp, Barcel and Fritto Crac — and that the last two had been bought in 1998, strengthening the group’s growth. It named Ruffles, Cheetos and Doritos among its consumers’ favourites, together with local lines such as Chis Pop, Gatolate and Traga Traga, and plain potato crisps. Its online product search, in a 2002 version, sorted the range into categories including potato crisps, nuts, sweet and salty extruded snacks, canisters and a category called Ramita. The company described itself as the leading snack maker in Chile; that is its own claim. Spanish Wikipedia’s article on Lay’s says that in Chile Lay’s crisps are made and distributed by Evercrisp, “a subsidiary controlled by PepsiCo Chile.”

The same website also told the parent company’s story, as Frito-Lay tells it. In 1932 Elmer Doolin began making Fritos corn chips in San Antonio, Texas, at first in his mother’s kitchen, and moved the business to Dallas in 1933. The same year Herman Lay started distributing potato chips in Nashville, Tennessee, and in 1938 he bought the Atlanta plant that supplied him, founding H.W. Lay & Company. The two companies merged as Frito-Lay, Inc. in September 1961, and in 1965 Frito-Lay and Pepsi-Cola merged to form PepsiCo, a plan approved by both sets of shareholders on 8 June that year.

In the 1990s Evercrisp was the main brand behind tazos in Chile, Spanish Wikipedia says — the small printed discs of cardboard and plastic that snack makers packed into their bags for children to collect and play with. Sabritas played the same role in Mexico and Walkers in Britain, the same article says.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all food and drink names from Latin America: Club Colombia, Jet, Cachantun, Evercrisp, Yoki, Vigor and Pullman. Latin American food and drink brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family firms that still carry a founder’s name to names that now belong to much larger food and drink groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a corner shop to a supermarket shelf.

A food or drink brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single product than by a pack, a name and the meal, snack or drink it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production or grown far beyond the place where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its products are actually made and packed.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its products are made and how its packaging has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A Pepsi partner, a labelling law and an apple.

PepsiCo’s drinks and snacks have taken different routes in Chile. Pepsi itself has been made under an agreement with PepsiCo by the brewer and drinks group CCU since 1959, according to Spanish Wikipedia, citing CCU’s published history; CCU also owns the mineral water Cachantun. Evercrisp, by contrast, has belonged to PepsiCo itself since the 1993 purchase. PepsiCo Chile said on its website in 2017 that its business units in the country created more than 2,000 direct jobs.

Packaging became a public issue after Chile’s food-labelling and advertising law, Law 20.606, came into force on 27 June 2016. Spanish Wikipedia, citing the Ministry of Health’s evaluation of the law’s first year, lists PepsiCo among the companies found in breach, over advertising aimed at children under 14 on its Cheetos and Gatolate packs, and says PepsiCo went to court arguing that the rules conflicted with intellectual-property rights.

One name needs care. EverCrisp is also the trademarked name of an American apple variety, MAIA-1, developed by the Midwest Apple Improvement Association from a Honeycrisp and Fuji cross, English Wikipedia says; it has no connection with the Chilean snack maker.

For a design guide, Evercrisp shows a Chilean snack name that has stood behind PepsiCo’s range in the country since 1993, from tazos to Lay’s. Compare Sabritas, PepsiCo’s Mexican snack brand, and Lay’s, the crisps Evercrisp makes in Chile. For this guide we use a chilli red, a chip yellow and a deep blue with a bold sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Evercrisp’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.