Question: It says on your profile you worked at pepsi, is that the drinks company and if it is did they let you taste it and give you free samples?

Andy Norton answered on 14 Jun 2011:

Heya!

Yes, that is the drinks company. Pepsico is a really big company, and it has bought lots of smaller companies over the years. So not only does it make Pepsi, it also makes crisps (as they own Walkers – http://www.pepsico.co.uk/walkers-crisps ). I was looking at crisps for my job. The crisps that I was looking at start off as really hard little blocks of starch (they look like bits of plastic, and about the size of a cocktail stick). I then put them in an oven, which had a video camera attached, and I filmed them expand into light, long and thin, crunchy crisps with lots of air pockets in (I can’t really tell you what the make of crisps are called, I am afraid. My bad!). From the videos, I then assessed different things about how they expanded. I then changed various things, like the temperature of the oven, how much salt is in the crisp, how much water is in there etc.), and tried to work out what difference this made. The overall aim was to try and make crisps that are really tasty and crunchy, but with less salt than they have at the moment.

So, no, I didn’t get any free samples of Pepsi, but I did get free crisps! I got about 2 boxes full of different crisps that they make. But, after spending two months working with crisps, I was sort of fed up with them! Hehe.

If you take a look at this link, you can see a bit of my paper (hopefully): http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0260877411000689