PepsiCo admits it’ll be hard to cut salt in snacks further

PepsiCo has warned that it won't be able to make any more radical cuts to salt levels in its Walkers crisps until there have been further scientific advances.

The company had taken reformulation as far as it currently could without significantly affecting taste, said PepsiCo Europe regulatory affairs director Natalia Douek, speaking at The Grocer Food and Health conference last week.

Although it would continue to make incremental changes, it was likely to be some time before it made further headline-grabbing reductions, she admitted.

Hitting the FSA's 2012 voluntary salt reduction targets on pellet snacks such as Quavers was proving particularly "challenging"because of the way they were produced.

"The current technologies have taken us a long way, but we will need new ones if we are going to make any more significant changes,"she said.