Frito Lay's Calle de Crunch | 2022

Designers: PepsiCo Design & Innovation, PepsiCo, Inc., New York, New York, USA
Manufacturer: PepsiCo, Inc., New York, New York, USA

The Super Bowl is a larger-than-life experience, and PepsiCo always brings the flavor to the Big Game weekend with brand activations that surprise and delight visitors. For Super Bowl LVI, the Frito-Lay brand and Design teams collaborated to create a highly engaging on-site activation that would serve as the central hub for all Frito-Lay events during Super Bowl weekend. Calle de Crunch (aka “Crunchy Street”) appeared as a dream-turned-reality LA-style neighborhood, outfitted with branded tiny houses and made complete with a corner market, all dedicated to favorite Frito-Lay brands, including Lay’s, Tostitos, Doritos, Cheetos and more. Designed with customers, consumers, and partners in mind, Calle de Crunch became a vibrant and celebratory destination to taste and learn what delicious snacks Frito-Lay brands have to offer, and provided the chance to rub elbows with NFL celebrities.

As the Design Team created Calle de Crunch, we wanted to create an activation that balanced the connection between the Frito-Lay portfolio, Super Bowl, and LA culture while successfully engaging and entertaining consumers. We landed on a visual blend of East LA architecture, bold graphics, and collaborated with local LatinX artists to make the experience truly unique and unforgettable. From a practical execution standpoint, we constructed Calle de Crunch out of shipping containers, and prefabricated the visual elements in a different location for a quick installation process since we only had two days for set up.

The block consisted of three separate tiny houses, each with front yards featuring Doritos, Lay’s, and Cheetos and as well as interior living room spaces. These were set between a community stage and a Tostitos corner store-style market at the end of the street. Each branded house was designed around a theme. Lay’s showcased local Latinx artists and included murals, Doritos featured custom-built cars, and Cheetos celebrated fashion. Every inch of the space—both exteriors and interiors—had layers of details to explore, and a narrative to follow. Each tiny house was built for social sharing-worthy photo moments celebrating both Latinx and football culture.

Calle de Crunch was successful in meeting its goal of reaching a broad audience at the Super Bowl and beyond, sharing moments of joy with a 360 Frito-Lay branded experience that spanned taste, aesthetics and music. The activation clocked 18K+ consumer visits, 12K+ new commercially compostable bags distributed, and 14 NFL players made appearances. Frito-Lay both laid a foundation of fun with some of its long-time favorite brands, and shared its vision for the sustainable future of snacks packaging and its ever-growing family of brands.