Shortly before the coronavirus pandemic, Tesco, the UK supermarket chain, held a conference with its suppliers. Silviu Popovici, European chief executive at PepsiCo, recalls that the then Tesco chief executive, Dave Lewis, held up a multipack of Walkers crisps.
According to Popovici, Lewis gestured at the crisps and told the attendees: “We don’t sell air — we don’t transport air and we don’t sell air”. He then warned all suppliers that, if they did not address the problem of overpackaging, their products were at risk of being removed from Tesco’s range.
PepsiCo, which owns Walkers, listened: it began cutting down on packaging and bringing in more eco-friendly materials, such as cardboard.