Yet another involves ill-advised experiments in PepsiCo corporate synergy, like the Quest, a mystery flavor that turned out to be Mountain Dew. Dragon’s Fire Chips-to those flavors aimed at the Harold and Kumar in all of us: Tacos at Midnight and Pizza Supreme. It was kind of a whim¬sical riff-but if Doritos put a smile on your face, well, that’s what we try to do, too.”Īt any given time Doritos has a dozen flavors on sale, from the extremely spicy-3rd Degree Burn: Scorchin’ Habanero and the wasabi-flavored Mr. “If you grow up on something, it becomes an iconic flavor memory.” A few years ago Achatz replicated Cool Ranch Doritos for a course at Alinea: “In a perforated plate, we inserted micro-lettuces, herbs, carrots, and radishes, and we made our own Cool Ranch powder and tapped it through a sieve to dust them. “I’ve eaten my share of Doritos,” confesses Grant Achatz, the award-winning chef at Chicago’s Alinea, and an admitted Cool Ranch aficionado. They let the Frito-Lay corporation know that a Dorito can taste like pretty much anything their food scientists could concoct. They were creamy, but with a kick: They tasted like they’d already taken a trip into a bowl of dip. But the floodgates really opened in 1986, when Cool Ranch Doritos blew the collective minds of junk food addicts around the world. The first flavored Doritos came about in 1967, intended for people who wanted a Mexican-style chip to bring something extra: taco! The iconic nacho cheese flavor -which now accounts for more than half of Doritos’ sales-wasn’t introduced until 1972. The answer was oro, Spanish for “gold.” Remembering that conversation, West added the “ito” suffix to emphasize that his new creation was part of the Fritos/Cheetos family, and said, “Let’s stick a D in front of it.” If he’d been in a different mood, we might all be eating Joritos or Zoritos. “It just means ‘fried.’ ” He asked a local what color he thought Fritos were, since they weren’t quite yellow or brown. So we said, ‘Let’s go with the triangles.’ ”ĭoritos’ name came from a trip West took to Mexico, where he’d been attempting to register Frito as a trademark.
“If you make circles, you’ve got a lot of trim. “You run the product on a belt and die-cut it,” West said. He picked the triangular shape to minimize waste. “Normally come out of the laboratory,” he chuckled, still savoring his end run around the bureaucracy.
West was a marketing vice president at Frito-Lay, and his invention circumvented the company’s R&D division. So the Dorito was born, made from yellow corn but with the size and texture of a potato chip. West had sampled a proto-Dorito at a restaurant in San Diego and realized its potential. they get seriously twisted: Care for some Winter Crab or Butter and Soy Sauce chips? But when Doritos debuted in 1966, they had just one flavor: toasted corn. Like so many of us, he loved them, even if he couldn’t quite explain why.įrito-Lay has mashed up dozens of Doritos flavors, from Tailgater BBQ to Last Call Jalapeño Popper. After Saddam Hussein was executed in 2006, his guards reported that his favorite snack was Doritos. Even our sworn enemies can’t resist their triangular temptations.
An all-American chip with a fake-Spanish name, Doritos have become one of our nation’s most distinctive exports. They’re as important a Super Bowl staple as over-the-top renditions of the national anthem and have developed a cultlike following among foodies and stoners alike. Today Doritos sells about $5 billion worth of chips annually. “I had an idea for a product in between potato chips and corn chips,” West told me shortly before his death, in what proved to be his final interview.