Marketing Salt

Browsing the Penzeys spice catalog (and visiting one of its stores), it's clear that marketing salt can be a delicate balancing act. It tastes good but eating too much can have health consequences. Plus salt is quite plentiful, which means marketers have to sell the "sizzle."

Now Penzeys offers two salts. Here's what the online catalog has to say:

For years we have stayed away from selling salts. We find more excitement in blending spices (sometimes with salt) than in just packaging a product we get elsewhere. All salt is really sea salt. The salt mines are just bringing up salt that settled at the bottom of the sea many millions of years ago.

Yet people are excited about exotic salts with gourmet possibilities, so Penzeys now sells Pacific Sea Salt and Kosher Style Flake Salt.

Meanwhile, PepsiCo is creating a designer salt that adds less sodium to people's diet. By 2015, the corporate goal is to slash the amount of sodium in its salty snacks by 25%.

Today's Wall Street Journal quotes Pepsico's Indra Nooyi as saying: "We want our potato chips to be fried in the healthiest oils with the lowest salt." In other words, the marketing sizzle will be on the taste and health aspects of PepsiCo's designer salt.