If you’ve followed food trends over the last few years, then you know how massively popular low-carb lifestyles have become. Consumers in these communities are passionate about finding and creating snacks to fit their dietary restrictions, but they often have challenges finding the perfect snack to grab off the shelf. Hilo Life understands “the struggle is real” for carb-counting consumers and offers them a solution while celebrating the fun of snacking.

Hilo Life was developed by PepsiCo with a quick-cycle innovation approach, operating as an incubator model, constantly building and expanding the company’s product portfolio to meet consumers’ ever-changing needs. Hilo Life is part of a larger effort to focus on creating consumer-centric brands in high growth, on-trend areas to create and digitally launch new brands, and then scale winning propositions into retail. Backed by PepsiCo’s e-commerce and digital capability ’s data analytics and design research approach, this new brand fills a specific snacking void in the carb-counting community, giving consumers options that bring joy, ease, and flavor to carb-counters and beyond.

Hilo Life offers consumers two delicious and familiar flavors, Really Ranchy and Super Cheesy, that satisfy those inevitable snack attacks. With crunchy nuts and crispy cheese as the base ingredients and 4g net carbs or less per pack, Hilo Life makes it easy to enjoy a carb-counting lifestyle. The single-serve packaging of Hilo Life provides an easy solution for on-the-go snack-ing. The friendly and inviting lowercase script, bright colors and quirky illustrations on pack act as a visual reminder for consumers to enjoy the simple pleasure of the snacking experience and not take things so seriously. Hilo Life is a category disrupter as competitors in the space tend come off as unapproachable and are militantly marketed, touting potential benefits over taste, texture and overall joy.

With the launch of Hilo Life in fall 2019, its impactful packaging design allowed it to rise to the top of a crowded category. These strong sales also produced social proof from consumers on the site, with 118 customer ratings averaging 4.2 out of 5 stars, and 63% being full 5-star reviews.