Takis Beats Doritos

In US searches, one Grupo Bimbo brand draws nearly twice the attention of Doritos. Measure a big food portfolio the same way and its strongest brands turn out to sit where attention is thinnest.

You know the portfolio review. The brands are ranked on a slide by revenue, then by margin, then by share of shelf. The ones at the top got the most money last year and will ask for more this year, and the case is easy to make, because every number in the deck says they are winning. The question almost nobody in the room asks is whether anyone is still looking for them.

That question is harder, because the deck cannot answer it. Sales record what people bought after they had already decided. Search sits closer to the moment of deciding, when someone is curious enough about a brand to type its name. If you are the one deciding which brands to fund, it is the difference between reading last year and reading next year.

General Mills gave a clean example of what is at stake in June 2025, when it completed the sale of its US yogurt business, Yoplait included, to Lactalis. That business still brought in about $1.2 billion of sales in its final year. On a revenue slide, it was a large business.

So I ran a simple test on nine US grocery categories to see what the same portfolio looks like measured by attention instead. For each category I named a set of three to six brands, pulled twelve months of Google search volume for each name, and worked out each brand's share of the searches in that set. The whole dataset cost less than a dollar.

The aisle with the most attention

The largest set by a distance is salty snacks, at just over a million searches a month. PepsiCo owns four of its six names: Doritos, Cheetos, Lay's and Ruffles. The single most-searched brand is none of them. It is Takis, made by Barcel, part of Mexico's Grupo Bimbo. Takis draws 36.3 percent of the searches in the set. Doritos draws 19.8. Lay's draws 10.8, level with Pringles.

To be fair to PepsiCo, its four brands together hold 52.8 percent, well ahead of Takis. The company is not losing the aisle. But no single one of its brands draws the attention that one rolled tortilla chip does, and a portfolio review built on sales would never show you that.

Nine categories, ranked by attention

Here are all nine sets, ranked by how many searches the named brands draw between them each month.

Read the table from the top. The three largest sets, salty snacks, confectionery and better-for-you drinks, have no General Mills brand in them. General Mills leads twice: Cheerios in cereal at 31.1 percent, the fourth-largest set, and Betty Crocker in baking mixes at 45.8 percent, the seventh. Totino's and Progresso hold second place in theirs. Nature Valley holds 14.6 percent of bar searches, under a third of Clif Bar's 48.9, and Clif Bar belongs to Mondelez.

Where General Mills leads, the pool of attention is modest. Where the pool is largest, it isn't there.

A decision that has already been made once

Now go back to yogurt. The business General Mills sold was large by revenue. By attention, it had already become a small brand: Yoplait draws 7.3 percent of the searches in its set, fifth of five, while Chobani draws 54.7.

The sale was made on financial numbers, as it should have been. The point is that the attention numbers were pointing the same way, and they cost cents to pull. Nature Valley sits in a similar position today, a distant third in a smaller set. The same question applies to it, and it can be asked now, rather than after the sales line confirms the answer.

What a portfolio review usually measures instead

Revenue, share of shelf, margin by segment. None of them tells you whether anyone is looking for you. A brand can hold its shelf for years after attention has moved on, because shelves follow sales, sales follow habit, and habit is slow to break. That lag is exactly why attention is worth watching.

Research on share of search, starting with Les Binet's work for the IPA, found that a brand's share of searches tends to move ahead of its market share in the categories studied, often by several months. It is an early reading, not a verdict.

What this does not show

Search is not sales. Habit categories like cereal generate fewer searches per dollar than snacks people discover, share and talk about. A small pool of attention is not a small business: cereal remains a very large one. What the table shows is where new attention is going, not where the money is today.

Every share belongs to a named set. The brand lists are printed under the table so anyone can challenge them. Swap one brand and every number in that row changes.

Brand names are messy. Totino's is searched under two names, and the two are summed here. "Lay's" and "Lays" return the same combined figure, so it is counted once. Pillsbury is left out of General Mills' baking count, because General Mills sells Pillsbury dough while Pillsbury baking mixes are made by another company under license, and search can't tell the two apart.

This is not advice to buy a snack company. Salty snacks and confectionery have their own incumbents and their own economics. The piece names the question. It does not answer it.

If your strongest brands sit in your smallest pools of attention, the portfolio question is not which brand to grow. It is whether you are competing where people are actually looking, and what it would cost to get there.

Related from Sound Decisions: Same Cocoa Shock, Two Answers · Distribution Doesn't Create Demand · A Third of the Shelf

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