Walkers Drops the 'Crisp' From Its Logo as It Aligns With Lay’s Global Rebrand

Walkers recently made its biggest logo change in 80 years, and the "crisp" is gone.

The U.K. brand unveiled a sun-inspired design last week, replacing the crisp symbol with rays of light emanating from the logo's center.

The redesign brings Walkers closer to Lay's, its PepsiCo sister brand, which launched a global rebrand in October 2025 featuring the Rays sunburst.

This suggests Walkers is prioritizing brand flexibility over category cues, aligning its visual system with a global architecture designed to travel across formats, products, and markets.

In doing so, the logo shifts from selling a specific snack to carrying brand meaning at scale, where recognition matters more than literal representation.

The Farm-to-Bag Storytelling

Walkers' rebrand has followed Lay's course from last year's major redesign.

Carl Gerhards, PepsiCo's senior design director, explained Lay's approach in a DesignRush podcast.

"We redefined [the logo] as the sun to be more overt. The red ribbon that wraps it is meant to be a bow being tied by our farmers."

Lay's backed its redesign with ingredient changes, moving to no additives or colors from artificial sources.

It also changed its packaging to show wood-grain backdrops to suggest real farm crates.

PepsiCo's Frito-Lay North America represents 27% of the company's $91.85 billion revenue from 2024, making shelf conversion lifts commercially significant.

This revenue concentration gives added weight to even small design decisions, since marginal gains scale quickly across a portfolio of this size.

In this context, the sun figure operates as the core design language, carrying meaning across packaging, storytelling, and sourcing cues.

It gives the brand a repeatable and recognizable visual identity that can scale across SKUs without reintroducing product imagery.

Removing the Crisp Signals Bigger Ambitions

Marketing professor Zachary Estes from Bayes Business School told Metro that removing the crisp shows that Walkers wants to be about more than chips.

"Walkers only recently updated its current logo, so changing it again is ill-advised unless they have something bigger in mind," he explained.

While Walkers announced the new Hot Honey flavor, a single SKU doesn't justify an 80-year milestone redesign.

The new logo's flexibility suggests preparation for category expansion beyond the chip aisle.

Brands investing in major rebrands without obvious product changes are typically clearing visual space for moves they haven't announced yet.

Three patterns emerge from Walkers' logo redesign:

• Rebrand timing creates dual news hooks: Announcing Hot Honey alongside the visual refresh generates coverage from both food and design media.
• Sister brand coordination signals strategy: When brands adopt matching systems within months, expect coordinated portfolio moves across markets.
• Heritage updates signal category confidence: 80-year-old brands only invest in major redesigns when fundamentals support expansion.

Brands reading logo changes as expansion signals should look for the gap between redesign scale and product announcement scope.

Our Take: Is Walkers Preparing to Stretch Beyond Chips?

I think the crisp coming out of the logo feels like Walkers is clearing the deck for something new.

PepsiCo already showed us that the sun-and-farm template worked globally with Lay's, so bringing Walkers into the same system makes operational sense.

However, I think the real tell is what they removed and not what they added.

When a heritage brand strips its core product from the identity, it's usually making room for growth that doesn't fit the old visual language.

In other news, Sabrina Carpenter makes her Super Bowl debut with Pringles, showing how brands court Gen Z by aligning with cultural figures who already command attention.

Brands navigating rebrands need partners who understand when to preserve equity and when to create room for growth.

Take a look at the top branding agencies in our directory.