Dallas, Texas—In a surprise move this morning, snack giant Frito Lay introduced a new and improved Thunder Bag, the latest leap forward in noisy packaging. Not satisfied with the obnoxiously noisy Sun Chips bag introduced into stores last January, company officials claim this new package will end all arguments about who has the loudest chip bags on the market.
“When customers reported back to us that opening the old bag only registered 95 decibels, we knew we could do better,” said Senior Vice President of Package Innovations and lead engineer, Dennis Wheeler. “I mean, that’s the equivalent of a subway train at 200 feet. It takes prolonged exposure to cause hearing loss at that level. We wanted something a bit more noticeable.”
And noticeable is what the Sun Chips team delivered. The new bag reportedly registers 125 decibels when opened—the level at which sound becomes painful.
When the previous incarnation of the bag was introduced, sales began to fall. “We heard reports that customers weren’t buying the new bags. And immediately we knew it was because they simply weren’t loud enough,” replied spokesman James Bates, when asked why the company was introducing the new bags now. “Customers don’t just want to wake their children with a late night snack. They want to wake the whole neighborhood!”
Where the older bags were made from a plant-based material called polylactic acid, the new bags are made from a newly developed polymer code named “deafenium”, with an even higher glass transition temperature, the root of the bag’s loud crackle.
When asked what the future of loud packaging held, Wheeler promised even more exciting advances in the months to come. “My job as an engineer is to constantly improve all our packages. We’ve barely scratched the surface with this new bag. The loudest noise ever recorded was 194 decibels, so we can still do better. We want a package so loud it can be heard in the middle of a Jerry Bruckheimer movie.”
