Lay's redesigned potato farming around the workers actually doing it

Lay's faced an agricultural shift in India: more farm work was being done by women, but the surrounding system had been designed around men. APAC Effie says PepsiCo India and Leo partnered with 27,000 farmers and found women-led farms yielded 30% less than male-led farms.

Project Farm Equal did not answer with a brand film alone. WARC describes a women-centric ecosystem: redesigned tools and processes, gender-sensitive agronomist training, self-help groups, and recognition such as a Women Farmers postage stamp.

The result was business as well as social proof. WARC reports a 24.6% yield increase, 4x income growth for women farmers and a 6.3% sales increase for Lay's; APAC Effie reports a 15.1% potato-yield lift and 4x income increase.

Design the farm system for women

The campaign treated inclusion as operations, not only communications.

Ergonomic and process changes attacked the yield gap at the daily-work level.

Linking farmer income to potato supply made the project defensible as core business.

A supply-chain gap may be a design mismatch: fix the tools and routines around the real operator, not the imagined one.

Farm Equal became an awards case in 2025, appearing in WARC's Cannes Creative Lions coverage and as an APAC Effie finalist. Its useful pattern is to audit who actually performs the work, then redesign the supply chain around that operator's body, constraints and incentives.