Hello, welcome savor prediction of iHeart Radio.
I'm Any and I'm Moren Mogelbaum, and today we have an episode for you about Dorito's.
Not a sponsor, nope, but wow, quite an episode. Yeah. Yeah.
So the reason this was on my mind is that, you know, we are entering a cookout season here in Atlantis certainly, and you know the weather is turning and it's been like kind of nice and sunny out and we're about to come up on a bunch of weekends where people tend to go have picnics or grill out or whatever it is and perhaps eat some hacken.
Chips, perhaps eat some hacken chips, and people a lot of people love Dorito's. They do. They have a lot of fans. I can't wait to talk about it more. And I listeners. At the top of the episode, I'm just going to say, please write in any of your Dorito thoughts. Oh yeah, I'm nearly positive that most of you have at least one Derrito memory or opinion. Yeah.
Yes, And strangely enough, I feel like that counts for more of a global audience than I would usually be confident in. I don't think I knew exactly how big this brand was, and I don't know why I didn't, but I'm like, you've got Peter Dinklage rapping about them at the Super Bowl ad, like that's like, why am I surprised about this?
Yeah, they're a very specific type of brand that has the energy of we know who our audience is. I haven't had Doritas in a long time, but when I was in high school, I went through a big dourrito phase and I loved putting the nacho cheese Doritos on sandwiches, primarily turkey sandwiches. Okay, so it would just be turkey and Doritos. Interesting, like wet ingredients would they would mess with the integrity of the crunch of the dorrito, which is what I wanted.
You were looking for the dorito crunch. Yeah, yes, but it was really good. And for a while that was like a whole thing. Every day I had a Toto sandwich.
And then that phase faded away, And that's kind of into that. Oh.
I love those food obsessions you go through, kind of especially when you're a kid, and maybe perhaps a slightly neuro diverging kid who just gets obsessed with like a flavor or a texture, or whatever it is.
And no one can I mean, no one can really stop you. So you're just like, all right, yeah, this is what I'm doing for right now. I've never been a chips on a sandwich human like I. I feel like they tear up the roof of my mouth and I get mad. Yeah. Well, we're going to talk about this kind of a briefly in a history section. But I did have an incident where a Dorito sandwich did do some harm. Well, but it was minor. It was minor harm. Sure, you live to tell the tale, and
that's what's important. Yes, And I still had a Dorito sandwich the next day, so there you go.
Yeah, I mean, Dorito's taste great. It's you know, I try really hard to not purchase things like snack chips because they're expensive, and then and then you just and then if you have them, you're gonna eat them, and then that's you know, there were more nutritionally sound options to make that, honestly, probably cost less money. However, I will say that while reading about various international flavors of Dorito's freedo, lay, y'all, they come up with beautiful flavors everywhere, but here.
I know, I have moments of intense jealousy listeners or if I'm missing out on something because again, like I don't like, I don't buy a lot of Doritos, so like very occasionally, if I'm going to a party or something like that, I'll be like, yeah, hey, those are going to be tasty. Yeah yeah, I mostly you know what I'm sad about. And I don't know if I cared enough to remedy the situation. I've never had to Dorito's Loco Stacco, Oh no no, And I know people
love them, but I don't know. I'm at a crossroads.
At a crossroads, I feel like you have a general compunction against junk about like fast food.
Yeah, I mean some brands in particular, but I don't generally eat fast food, but I could for research, I could make an exception.
Uh well, it's exactly what you would expect that that it is. It is what it says on the label. That's okay. And if you're into that, it's delicious. I mean it is engineered, deeply engineered to be delicious, and it is, so there you go. Yeah, they put a lot of research into these things. Gosh, these for sure hoofta four other episodes. You can see our episodes on tacos and nachos for more on like corn tortillas and corn chips.
Yes, but I guess that brings us to our question, Sure, Doritos, what are they? Well?
Doritos is a large international brand of primarily snack chips made from a fried corn dough with a usually heavy dusting of flavored powder coating each chip. The chips are typically in a triangle shape with rounded corners like two to three inches on a side that's about five seven centimeters,
although they can come in other shapes and sizes. Flavors tend towards this variety of like very well honed combinations of tangy, savory salty with like a little bit of sweetness, And these days they've been leaning into more spicy concepts.
But the two classic ones are nacho cheese, which are this purposefully fake cheese flavor with a bright orange color, and then cool ranch, which are like a slightly herbal, creamy ranch dressing flavor with a kind of light cream color and little flex of green and orange in it. They come in crinkly plastic bags and individual serving or multi serving sizes. They are typically eaten straight out of the bag as a snack, or maybe like a lunch side dish, alongside a sandwich or in one if that's
your thing. They don't really taste like food, but they are so pleasing to consume, so crisp and crunchy, and that combination of flavors is tantalizing. They're like an ad man's reimagining of food, like big and bold, and it doesn't matter that's not nutritious because this is food in three D and technicolor. It's like eating a television ad. Each chip just bright and electric and void.
I like this dark. It's not dark. It's a little dark, a gritty take on it. But I feel it because when I think of Gurrito's, it does have this. I think of the nineties ads that were so color extreme. Yeah, exactly. I feel that Gerrito's encapsulated in our more modern times at least, is that it's like, just eat more and more and more and more, and it tastes good, and these commercials are great, so get some more. Yeah. Kind of is really like leaning into being silly and big
and I don't know, it's it's weird. It's weird.
I have a lot of I have a lot of feelings about it. I'm kind of still kind of still unwrapping them, honestly, but okay. So, Dorito's is owned by Free Doo Lay, which is a subsidiary of the food and beverage giant Pepsi Coo, and the brand concept is vaguely like vaguely Mexican text mes, Mexican American themed, but only vaguely, and it kind of varies from market to market.
As of right now in the United States, their lineup of those typical triangular chips includes of course nacho, cheese and cool ranch, then a siracha flavor, a barbecue sauce flavor, salsaverde spicy sweet chili, cobranded tapetillo flavor that is this upsetting shade of red retro taco seasoning flavor, spicy chili lime flavor called Flamma okay uh, and then three Flame and Hot flavors, which is a sub brand that started with Cheetos. They've got Flame Hot cool Ranch, Flame and
Hot Nacho, and Flame and Hot Lime. They've also got a different shape that Mini's, which are about an inch to a side and come in a tube and then chips that have been rolled into a hollow cylinder shape like a little tube, like a little straw almost. They call these Dinamta all in caps and the flavors are flame and hot, caeso and chili lime, and the Dinamta chips have a Dinameter label on the bag to tell.
You how spicy they are.
And yes, this is their direct answer to competitors snack brand Talkies, which is owned by Mexican food giant Bimbo Dorito's has invented these like Sassy a boila characters for the advertising for them, named Dinah and Meta.
I have so many questions that we could end the podcast now and never get further, all right, I yeah, the dangers of not watching television, or that you no longer get as many advertisements for wacky things like this, and I kind of regret it. This is this is quite something, quite something, yes, But internationally they've got other offerings for different markets. Most markets do seem to have some riff on the classic nacho cheese flavor, and usually
the classic ranch flavor. It's not called Ranch in international markets, but something like Cool American or Cool Original is pretty common. But yeah, after that, anything goes. Some markets seem to be really focused on American themed flavors and others on more local flavors. For example, in Taiwan there's been flavors like spicy garlic or Sishuan peppercorn chicken. Japan has had wasabi teraake, burger shrimp mayo. South Korea has had a
honey chili and an oven roasted galby chicken. Australia has different There's a different nacho cheese versus Cheese Supreme flavor, and then there's a third that's called Mexicana that's the same color basically as the other two. I have no idea what the difference is is, because what the differences are because I couldn't find labels that listed the ingredients.
Not that always tells you that much with something with this many ingredients, but y'all write in the UK has had a cheeseburger flavor and a hint of curry flavor. Currently they've got like a loaded pepperoni pizza flavor. Yeah wow, Yeah, I'm gonna have to look at my local store and see what we've got going. But I just don't think we have quite the variety that I'm here and here, and I like some of these. Yeah, mostly right now.
I feel like it's like most stores will have like nacho cheese flame and hot nacho cheese, and that's kind of what you've got. Yeah, yeah. Oh.
Dorito's does also sell dips in various markets, like sauces and cheese dips like or cream based dips. They also sometimes license their name and flavors out to other brands, like Taco Bell or Rolled Gold pretzels. To produce the chips, Doritos takes fresh corn kernels and cooks, soaks, and washes them, then grinds them into dough. The dough is needed and pressed into thin sheets out of which individual chips are stamped, sort of like a cookie cutter. The chips are dried
and then deep fried. The flavorings are applied by tossing the chips in drums. There's like a mist of oil being sprayed inside the drum to make the surface of the chips a little bit tacky or sticky, and then
the prepared powder is sprinkled in and coach the chips. Yeah, and they do a lot of cool, weird science things to make these chips delicious, like in addition to many many different flavoring agents also commonly contain what's called in the flavor industry flavor potentiators, and these are compounds that muck about with your taste receptors in your mouth to make you more sensitive to a particular flavor, in this case, the savory or umami flavor that you experience when you
consume glutamates, glutamates being iterations of an amino acid that tastes savory or lumammy. So doritos contain glutamates, and then they also contain these potentiators that temporarily physically alter your glutamate receptors to make them more sensitive, like up to thirty times more sensitive, so like you truly experience more flavor while you're eating doritos.
Wow.
In the processed food industry in general, potentiators can be used to help reduce the amount of a given ingredient that needs to be included, and not just the one that the potentiator works in tandem with. In the case of the glutamate one, I think it's more expensive than the glutamates, so that would be silly, but you can, for example, they can help. The food made with reduced sodium still taste flavorful, so it's cool in various applications.
Slightly insidious, I adore it. A few other tricks are in there, like like the flavor powder mix is given this super fine flour level grind, which lets the powder really like fill every part of the surface of a chip and your fingers and your mouth, and thus increases like the surface area of the flavoring, so that the flavoring hits more of those receptors and tastes stronger.
Wow, oh man, And yeah. Yeah.
They're typically eaten as is, but their website insists that there are all kinds of things things you can do with them, mostly involving crushing them up and using them as like a crispy coating or topping like our breadcrumbs. Not enough if you're deep frying a whole onion. Yeah, Dorito's has a solution for you. They do also list of peanut butter and nacho Doritos sandwich, and I thought of you.
Oh wow, Okay, that's okay, I can see that. I can see that working. Oh yeah, I feel like a couple of years ago there was a I can't remember if it was flaming hot cheetos are Dorito's, but there was a like Thanksgiving turkey recipe. Oh oh, that got a lot of traction where the chrome you fry it? I guess, okay, yeah, I mean I'm sure it was tasty. Yeah, huh, I guess I kind of went to the bad place there for a second. But I'm coming back from it.
And yeah, in the in the States, and ye all write in about other cultural experiences, but in the States, there is a pretty deep cultural nostalgia surrounding Dorito's as like a simple snack that you've probably had as a kid, or maybe at picnics or cookouts or like home viewings of sporting events. And there's a bit of like almost fetishization of getting a little bit messy while you're eating them, because the powder coating does stick to your fingers and
it's like culturally allowable to lick it off. And like fetishization is a strong word. But does people have like specifically strong positive emotions about that.
Yes, yes, I believe. Isn't that called the Dorito's experience? I found a Reddit post about the experience. I haven't read that term, but but yeah, I mean we can we can call it that? I think people do. Oh, we don't have to know. I'm cool with it. Yeah, no reason not to. Speaking of the Dorito's experience, Man, corporate marketing makes me feel so insane. Allow me to quote for you from the Dorito's website. All right, Dorito's Reserved isn't just a chip. It's fuel for disruption. Our
flavors ignite adventure and inspire action. With every crunch, we aim to redefine culture and support those who are boldly themselves. Are you ready if so, crunch on? Wow, my aspiration. We aim to redefine culture. I don't know what that means. I don't know what redefining culture means the specific instance. And I'm slightly scared. And this absolutely flavored by my top of the episode text. I mean, you are right, the corporate marketing they always love to do. It's not
just a chip. It's going to change the entire galaxy. And this is how And you read it and you're like, You're like, are we still talking about snack chips. I'm a little unnerved. I'm a little unsettled. Also, like I really hate, I really hate like disruptor culture. I really hate the term disruption, and so fuel for disruption is very funny to me. Yeah, like do we need to disrupt everything? Can't we maybe just like go with a flow, just a little read the room. Perhaps, I don't know,
it's just spitball in here. Yeah, just eat some delicious chips with your friends and that's okay. We don't have to disrupt that. Well, what about the nutrition treats are nice? Treats are nice. Yeah, that's a nice We do have some numbers for you. Yeah, uh so okay. Uh.
Doritos are the top selling tortilla chip in the United States by far, with something like seventy percent of the tortilla chip market share, and they have been for years. They sold about one point one four billion units in twenty twenty four.
Uh huh.
They're also the top selling tortilla chi in the UK. I believe in even higher market share, like something around seventy nine percent, and Dorito's runs Europe's largest tortilla chip factory in Coventry in the UK. Some one third of UK households purchased Dorito's. But so PepsiCo is actually a little quiet about exactly how much business their brands do, Like how much resources each one uses and what their exact profits are.
And stuff like that.
But I can tell you that Dorito's has been one of PepsiCo's billion dollar brands, that is a brand that makes over a billion in sales every year.
Since sometime in the nineteen nineties. Dang, yeah. It seems like Dorito's have been well loved, continue to be well loved, and yet the history I found was surprisingly not as well documented as I thought it would be.
You know, there are some brands that are like, we are going to aggressively detail this story, and some brands that are like, look over here, we've got a late night American hot wings flavor. Don't you want to eat it?
We've got to look over here one. But it's really interesting, a lot interesting stuff going on. Nonetheless, Yes, yes, and we are going to get into that history as soon as we get back from a quick break for a word from our sponsors, and we're back. Thank you, sponsor, Yes, thank you. Okay, so separate episode. But tortilla chips have probably been around for hundreds of years in areas that use corn based dough. It's just one of those things
that makes sense to me. M Yeah, especially right, Like, if you're making masa, if you're making tortillas, you're gonna make a chip out of it at some point. Yep, it just makes sense to me. But that being said, Freedo Lay is thought to be the first to make, distribute and selt repea chips on a large scale in the United States, and that was with Dorito's, all right. So the history of Doriedo's generally starts around the nineteen sixties.
This was when convenience and modern technologies were all the rage, and one of the companies really leaning into this was Disney and Disneyland is a name often thrown about in the discussion of the Doriedo's origin story. You never know when disney right Land is gonna pop up. I didn't know this, but it makes so much sense. It really does, It really does, all right. So, as the story goes, Anaheim's Disneyland had a Mexican restaurant called Casa de Frito's,
operated by Fretto l A in the nineteen sixties. It opened pretty soon after Disneyland opened. It was, of course good marketing for free doola. Customers got complimentary Freto's at the end of the meal. I think, and it was pretty savvy since this was around the time there was an increasing interest in Mexican food in the United States, and Disney kind of had that whole try foods from around the world vibe. And sure enough, this restaurant was so popular it had to move to a larger venue
just a few years after it opened. The restaurant didn't make their own tortillas, though, they contracted that out to Alex Foods, a company that delivered Mexican food items like tortillas across southern California. One day, a salesman from Alex Foods noticed that this restaurant was throwing out old tortillas, and he suggested that they fry them up and seasoned them as snack instead. And these chips were fairly popular.
I read they were a hidden menu item, and then I heard but they were like just a really popular one that ran out quickly. I'm not sure, but they got pretty popular, and somehow word got to an executive at Freedo Lay After getting a taste, the executive knew they had a winner on their hands, and production started in nineteen sixty four, and Dorito's hit grocery shelves in nineteen sixty six. At first, Alex Foods made the chips and Frido Lay sold them, but once the product was successful,
the company didn't renew the partnership with Alex Foods. However, there are a lot of other stories out how this whole thing happens. There's another one that's told a lot that the free Dolay marketing executive at the time, Archibald West, invented Dorito's. There are a lot of variations on this specific story, one being he enjoyed roadside tortillas that came in a round bag while he was on vacation with his family in nineteen sixty four, and then he set
out to replicate them. He also is sometimes the executive that tried the chips at Casa Deefrito's in the previous story. However, and I kind of love this. Even a public relations director at Freedo La has admitted they have no evidence of any of this, okay, and says that no one person invented Dorito's. Very diplomatic, very diplomatic, but I like even them had to be like, we can't say that's true.
Others say that the chips were a sourced from local Mexican producers and that it was their way of making money off of remaining pieces of tortillas, and then Fredo Lay basically just took credit for it. Just kind of a similar You can make that same telling of the alex food story as well, But anyway, whatever the case, Dorito's were being sold in the southwest of the country by nineteen sixty six and nationwide soon after. The first flavor they offered was simply toasted corn, though two years
later they added taco seasoning. With all the company's marketing efforts, Dorito's were pretty ubiquitous within a decade.
Yeah, partially because while all of this was going on, in nineteen sixty five, Freda Lay merged with Pepsi to form Pepsi Coo. And that really catapulted both companies.
Yes, and just to give you an idea of how much we have to say about Dorito's, I love company Legalese. This was a whole thing, and if you care to read about it, you can. But I was overwhelmed by everything else, so we'd go look it up if you about it. Mergers. Yeah, I'm so boring in some things. Oh my god, tell me about this Nacho cheese flavor was released in nineteen seventy two. Cool Ranch was introduced in nineteen eighty six, though it first went by the
name Cooler Ranch. By the nineties, Doritos were a household name in the United States and there were flavors galore. There were commercials everywhere. They were making an astonishing amount of money.
Oh yeah, Like, they did a product placement deal with the first Wayne's World movie.
Arth You know what I'm talking about, right, They.
Co branded with Taco Bell, They placed their first Super Bowl ad. It featured Chevy Chase. It was it was becoming a cultural thing.
Yes, but there was a lot of competition. So Freedo Lay did a bit of a Dorito's rebrand in nineteen ninety four nineteen ninety five. It included increasing the size of Dorito's chips by twenty percent, making them thinner, with more seasoning, and rounding out their edges, and that in part was because of a lawsuit from a few years earlier where someone claimed he'd been hurt by the sharp edges of the Dorito like the corners. Yeah, they redesigned the bag as well.
They were also expanding at this time. For example, they realized that the UK didn't have corn chips on the market, so they did a bunch of market research and released modified versions of a few Dourita's products in nineteen ninety four, with flavors like cool original, tangy Cheese, savory beef, and cheese an onion. I think it was just an individual serving bags at first, but then they launched a line of dips plus larger bags to go with them in
two thousand and one. I think the ad campaign for this was called friend chips.
Okay, all right, friendships. Sure. It was a really popular ad campaign that went international. Hey, if you have a friend who's hungry, Doritos might be friendships. They might save your friendship. Oh wow, okay, Well, this was also a time when they were trying a bunch of things like Dorito's three D, which were these puffed up versions. Yeah.
Oh, I mean they were sort of like like pretty like like if you ever had putty from an Indian subcontinent related restaurant. Yeah, it's sort of like those, but made with corn batter.
You know.
But how brief our time with Dorito's three D. They only lasted from nineteen ninety eight through two thousand and four. You never know how long you have. No, they did come back briefly in twenty twenty, but I don't think they're still on the market.
And they had fans. Yeah, people were upset. Uh huh. Listeners also write in if you've lost your favorite type of dorito. I've never had one, but I remember them distinctly, like I just remember the marketing for them. I guess. Yeah, I definitely consumed at least a handful. I think I had a friend who would like open it up and then put stuff inside. Yeah sure, sure it follows right, like that is right, like putty. Yeah sure, yeah.
Anyway, the marketing continued to develop. They had mystery flavors, like contests to kind of like guess the flavor and pick a name for it. They sponsored Stephen Colbert while he was doing presidential campaign coverage in two thousand and eight. There was a Mountain Dew flavored dorito.
I don't know both those brands. I stay align with the flavor of that. No, people didn't like it. It was bad. Okay, that was my gut reaction. But all right, thank you for confirming. Okay, here is the note that gave me the biggest headache. Oh, I'm sorry, okay, no, no, it was quite funny. I was just making sure I
wasn't being pranked, because that would be very embarrassing. In two thousand and eight, the Dorito's Broadcast project in the UK held a contest in biting the public to make a thirty second ad, with the winning ad, which was voted on being being into space to a solar system forty two light years away, and it would also be played on TV for a specific amount of time. The winning video was called Tribe. It's about kind of a
sacrificial Dorrito jumping into some salsum. This whole thing was part of a larger ad campaign from Dorito's called You Make It, We Play It, which they're actually kind of known for. Is this generative audience content?
Yeah, yeah, they still dabble in that sometimes, so yeah.
Yes, Well this was called the world's first extraterrestrial advertisement. But I have to say I'm not entirely sure it's true, because you would think they would have a lot written about it, but there isn't. And at first I thought it was because like it would take so long in theory, it hasn't even gotten to where it's being broadcast.
I guess no, not been forty two years since two thousand and eight. So I was like, but, I mean also, also, it's not like.
We're gonna know when it gets there, I mean, other than other than being like well times past exactly. And they kept saying a lot of the publications I was reading were like, they're gonna put it in the Guinness Book of World Records. So I went there no entry to be found. But you can't watch the winning submission on YouTube, so there's that.
So so I did some checking and I do think it's for real, although it is definitely a stunt and not like a particularly useful broadcast. So the whole thing was partially managed by the University of Lester's Department of Physics and Astronomy in the UK, and they talked to the press about it being an example of their public outreach to like garner interest in science.
Yeah.
Also a European scientific association called ice Cat EISCAT that works with like detecting and interpreting electromagnetic waves scattering in near space, which is as simply as I can put it, they work with waves and stuff. They used their equipment to send the signal, and they said that they received an undisclosed donation from Dorito's to do it, which is why I think it's absolutely true and not a prank.
A rep from that association told the publication New Scientist, it's not big money, but it could be the thin end of a wedge to using our resources in a new way some years in the future. The money that comes from this kind of commercial service could be used to fund pure research.
Well interesting, I did. I was reading the comments under the YouTube video. I was so unsure about the veracity of this whole thing, and a lot of people seemed to remember voting on it, and we're like, oh, yeah, this is the one I wanted to win. Okay, so that happened. Yeah, and I I I do have to say that the term world's first extraterrestrial advertisement makes me very unhappy. A lot of Yeah, a lot of people were also unhappy because they're like, now they're going to
come here. They are sentient Doritos, and we're just killing them.
I mean, that's assuming that they can decode the video.
So here we are. But there's a lot of intermediate stepped. There was some very cheeky joking about like how they were putting it in zeros and ones and like, did you use VLC? How did you code all of this? They did, But you know, it's just kind of a difficult concept to wrap your mind around anyway. So going back to that executive I mentioned at the beginning, when Arch West died in twenty eleven, his family sprinkled some doritos into his urn before it was buried. Well, that's
what his daughter said they were going to do. So he was a big fan, and he he was like in the taste tests up until he died. I think he really didn't like the Hamburger one. Oh okay, well yeah, you can read more about that if you would like. But this brings us too. Oh a collaboration between Taco Bell and that gave us the wildly successful Dorrito's Locos Tacos in twenty twelve. Taco Bells R and D Department, which is a real thing, and I've even seen a
mini documentary about it. Oh yeah, it's intense. Yeah, it's real intense. They spent two years refining it, and basically the hold up was figuring out how to make something dorito like that was sturdy enough to hold the toppings. Yeah, but they succeeded. They sold over a billion of those things the first year.
The first year, yep, they had to hire an extra fifteen thousand people to keep up with demand.
Huh. Yeah, and they have debuted other flavors, some of which have been discontinued to outrage and sadness. In twenty twenty two, they debuted flaming hot Territo's Tacos. Honestly, this whole thing is it was such a big deal you could probably do an episode on it alone. I was reading the numbers behind it. I was like, no, no, clearly not today, but not today. There is some controversy about who invented the DLT as it's called. There's two
main groups. Yeah, one of them being unpaid interns. Oh yeah, I mean it. I mean yeah. It seems like a team, like a team effort, perhaps competing teams. Perhaps some people weren't as recognized as others. But yeah, well it was a huge success. Yes, but this brings us to a fumble. Oh I had not heard about this, Oh I did. I can't wait to hear your thoughts about it. I
don't I missed this. In twenty eighteen, then Pepsiico CEO Indra Nui caused a bit of controversy after she said on the Freakonomics podcast that there were gender differences when it came to eating Dorito's because women quote don't like to crunch too loudly in public, and they don't lick their fingers generously, and they don't like to pour the little broken pieces and the flavor into their mouth. She claimed the company was working on a type of dorrito
that tasted the same but was more discreet. I guess like less crunch less powder. Uh. Well, the internet had thoughts about what was dubbed the Lady Dorito, to the point someone at Dorito's had to make a statement clarifying that there were no plans for such a product and quote, we already have doritos for women. They're called doritos, and
they're enjoyed by millions of people every day. At the same time, we know needs and preferences continue to evolve, and we're always looking for new ways to engage into light our consumers. And I wow, what a corporate response. I don't know if it's related, but Mui step down from her position that same year. Listen, if you think I'm not over here, with a bag of chips, dumping it out, dumping the crumbs and the dust, the flavor
dust directly into my face. That that is one of the purest moments you can experience as a human in this corporate hellscape of our modern world. Right, don't deny me that based on on my sex and or gender. The crunch is like half of the whole, the powder you're talking about, the whole chip. That's what makes it good. And going back to the Dorito's experience, some of it the fun is that you get your figures, get to dump the cross.
I yeah, that was, and particularly in twenty eighteen, when I will say we ladies were a tiny bit fired up about a number of things. Yeah, like making this statement that year in particular, I was.
Like, oh maam, what have you done? Like that's not what to say right now? Yeah, well that she also made a comment about like you can't put Dorito's in a purse, and I was like, yes, you can. Also why not I have chips in my purse right now. There don't happen to be Dorito's, but right, I mean, they're in a bag, They're not like I know anyway anyway, that happened. Oh heck, all right, uh less controversial. Well now,
I don't know, actually, y'all tell me so. In twenty twenty two, the brand launched this series of like pop up slash ghost kitchen restaurants called Dorito's after Dark, with like these kind of like fusion cuisine like stoner snack
culinary options. The concept has now landed more or less permanently at a stadium arena in La where they serve things like steamed dumplings that have a flame in hot dorito chili crunch topping, sushi rolls rolled in Dorita's dust, and a ramen rito, which is a burrito filled with chicken corn and ramen noodles in a sweet chili sauce. Okay.
They also serve a nacho cheese uh, machilada there, Mike, A lotta.
Okay. I think they hit the vibe they were going for, to be honest, Yeah, yeah, I mean, there's right. I think that they knew their audience and they made some choices, and they were strong choices, and we applaud, we applaud strong choices. Uh huh yeah, listeners, if you've been here tried it, oh yeah, or if the pop ups were like really brief and I think only in a few plates like like La and uh Vegas and maybe New
York or something like that. But but yeah, yeah, yeah, if you have any experience with all of that, do write in. I know that in other countries, I know that they've had flavors that were called like late Night flavors that I think were kind of similarly like fusion slash stoner sort of concepts. Yeah, but yeah, here we are. Here we are.
Also, in twenty twenty two, Derrida's launched a line of dips in the United States, which is like a full twenty years after a lot of other markets got them. After that initial success of Friendships in the UK that the ad campaign for the dips here in the Year of Our Dark Lord twenty twenty two, in contrast to Friendships was big Dip Energy.
Yep. That sounds about right. Yep. Well, speaking of I guess, Empirical partnered with Torito's in twenty twenty three to produce a nacho cheese flavored liquor.
Yes, Empirical being this liquor company run by a couple of kids who used to work together at Noma and enjoy weird flavor experiments as you would probably expect, and unlike many stunt products which are created for like one marketing push and never really come never really come to market, like, this is a real product that you can go purchase, like as of this recording in late May of twenty twenty five, I do understand their their products are generally
like small batch and limited, so I don't know how much longer it's going to be there. But from that product page on Empirical's website, the spirit opens with umami and tangy aromas of nacho cheese, moving to the deeper, corn forward flavors of the chip to finish on a soft salty note. All right, it sounds lovely, you know, yeah, sure, And apparently what happened here is that like Dorito's wasn't like, hey, do any wackos want to make a Dorito flavored liquor? Like,
Empirical reached out to Dorito's about it. The story goes that while Empirical was in their early stages of playing with like how to extract different compounds by by tweaking the distillation process, one of their employees brought in a lunch of a sandwich and a bag of Nacho Doritos, and one of the company heads was like, hey, I wonder if I could extract that, and basically stole their chips and apologized, but ran the chips through the still
and it worked like the liquor tasted like Dorito's, and they just kind of thought it was like funny and delightful, and they were like, let's bring this to more people who might find it funny and delightful.
So here we are. That's nice, that's a fun Let's just experiment with something story. Yeah, yeah, all right, So this is this is a kind of out there note. But in twenty twenty four, a team of researchers did some really interesting research with one of the food dyes that's used in Dorito's, called a tartrazine or yellow number five. They used this dye in an experimental imaging study. Okay, so you know how flesh is opaque and that makes it a pain for doctors to see what's going on
inside living body. Yeah, so flesh is opaque because it scatters visible light, so very Basically, their hypothesis was that if they could apply a safe water based dye to living tissues that strongly absorbs certain wavelengths of light.
Rather than scattering it. That would let other wavelengths of light pass through and bounce back and illuminate what's going on underneath. So they made parts of living mice temporarily transparent.
And what.
Yeah, like it's wild like this, Like the photos are like the skin of the mouse is transparent and you can see what's going on with like the blood vessels underneath or stuff like that. And yellow number five is used in plenty of things. But like the pop science headline that folks went with was Dorito's food dye can make mice transparent. Of course it was the first and like basically only result I got from googling certain key terms relating to Dorito's in science.
Yeah yeah, but interesting, feel weird, and I'm real glad that I read about it. Yeah, I'm glad you did too. Well this brings us to another spacefect Oh yeah, yeah, okay. Well. In twenty twenty four, Free doo La launched a limited time product, Dorito's Mini's Cool Ranch zero gravity flavored tortilla chips. And yes, these are Doritos that are civically designed to be enjoyed at zero gravity. They are bite size to avoid crumbs, and the powder was adjusted so it wouldn't
flit away. They were packaged in tins that were specifically designed for this situation. Dourrito's partnered with Saint Jude for this release, donating five hundred thousand dollars, and non astronauts could enter contests to get their hands on some by donating two hundred dollars to the organization. And in my opinion, this is part of why I got so confused with
my previous space fact. Hmm, this is their this is your space ad because you can watch online the astronauts eating it is pretty much an ad anyway, That's just how my brain works. That's but I did get hung up on this because I was like, I can this one I know was in space. You're like two space ads, but we can't even see the other one that didn't space. There's no there's no visual of the signal going out there.
Two space ads pix or it didn't happen. Yeah, they're really They've tried a lot of things, both in marketing and products not they offer. Oh yeah, yeah, I still have a tab open, and I'm sorry Annie, I know that my tab habits give you anxiety. But I have a tab open that lists two hundred and seventeen different flavors of Dorito's from over time. I was like, I was like, maybe I can list Nope, h do you know we love our list here, but even we have to realize when we've been defeated.
Yeah, and also like they've got they've had so many big marketing like big memorable marketing campaigns that I was like, kind of going to mention some of them, but then I mean, I guess I offhandedly mentioned the Peter Dinklage thing earlier, but yeah, I was just like, ah, that's fine.
Yeah. That was another thing I cut too because of time was the super Bowl. They're usually sponsors of the super Bowl, so yeah, they usually have a pretty big Super Bowl ad and a lot of times they make wacky announcements in them. So if you want to look that up, there's a lot of rabbit holes, I'll say in this.
One, all these big brands, it's it's wild. I'm also like, doing this reading made me so curious about about what the true scale of Dorito's is, Like how much corn do they process a year? Like where does that corn come from?
Where?
I mean They've got a whole bunch of ingredients in there. Where each of those come from and how how are they produced? And who is you know, who is being paid fairly for them? And I mean and the development teams too, Like I want to know about every single weird scientists. Who's who's up there like doing like like mad science for Dorito's, Like what is what are they
up to? There's a book that I have not read, so I can't recommend it, but that I'm saying it exists called the Dorrito Effect by one Mark Shatsker, that goes into these giant international food systems that wind up producing these just mega brands.
Yeah, and I know that was a big topic of conversation continues to be. But a big topic of conversation a couple of years ago was these companies are designing food that you eat almost addictively. All that stuff you're talking about at the top. So it's really interesting science. It's scary science, interesting science. But yeah, maybe one day in the future we can devote more time just to that. But Doritos took up enough of our time as it is. Yes, yes,
I think that's what we have to say for now. Yes, it is we do. We would love to hear from you though, as we have said, and we do already have some listener mail for you, which we are going to get into as soon as we get back from one more quick break forward from our sponsors. And we're back. Thank you, sponsor, Yes, thank you, and we're back with listen love. And they just haven't that vine, you know,
all right. So, because this episode is a bit longer and we have a bit of a longer listener mail today, we're splitting one in half. But we always love that, don't cane. I don't know, no, please give us the long the long takes. We love them, yeah, we do, We do love them, all right, So M wrote, I've been listening since the transition from food Stuff to Saver.
I could have written in many times, but it took for someone from Houston to mention Shipley's Donuts Colachi and I'm so sorry if I'm butchering that being pigs in the blanket for me to finally get up the gumption to writing, I do beg pardon for what will be a slightly long winded email. I went to grad school for sociology and focused on community and culture development through food and sharing food wasts, so this topic is close
to my heart. I have long thought the kolash and the klobas neck would be an excellent topic for y'all. Kolashi are sweet topped pastries, fruit jam, cream, cheese, poppy seed, et cetera, and klobasnck are sausage slash savory stuffed pastries. The kolatschi is rooted in the Czech immigrant community heritage. However, it appears that the kobas neck is a Czech Texan or Checksin creation, born of a love of savory foods in the state by the descendants of those original immigrants.
Back in the eighties, a man from Houston discovered the two delicacies while traveling through the check part of the state. Shout out to West Texas just north of Waco. Yes the town is named West and yes it causes confusion. He fell in love with the sausage klobas neck and decided to make a business out of it. The only problem he got the name wrong. He later founded the Texas Coloschi Factory in Houston, which took off from there, and so the confusion of what a coolachi is was
spread far and wide. They continue nowadays.
Most folks who didn't grow up stopping off at I thirty five, Exit three point fifty three for the required Coolachi clobasneck break between Austin and DFW know the coolachi as a sad pig in the blanket.
Friends.
Let me tell you that is so very wrong. My own spouse was one such individual who grew up in Houston. I made sure he learned what a klobasnek actually is. The klobasnek is a pillowy, soft dough that fully encompasses quality sausage links or meat of choice. Sometimes you have the option for cheese, jalapenos, pepperoni, ham. Even a beef and sauerkraut option one would be enough to tide you over until you get to dinner at your grandparents' house.
Two or three are enough so you might not need dinner, especially if you get a strawberry cream cheese colachi for dessert. I've attached Texas Monthly article for y'all to read. I tend to send it to the uninformed who show even a speck of interest in this important Texas staple. In my self appointed mission to share the true name of the checks and staple. I've also included the link to the Texas Colachi factory now called the Klachi Factory.
Their response to getting the name wrong. Apparently it's their own twist. All in all, I'm thankful that when I'm far from home, traveling or living elsewhere, that the proliferation of Kolachi and Klobasnek means that I can more easily access the taste of my childhood. Nothing beats so warm spicy sausage and cheese klobasnek while leaning against your car to stretch your legs after you've been on the road
for three hours. I do want to express my appreciation for all y'all have done for us, the listeners over the years. At the start of the pandemic, I wound up getting stuck in the Upper Midwest for a few years, not a bad place to be, but certainly only as a recent transplant, and the podcast helped provide distraction. Now that I'm back home in Texas for family, I still find comfort in the podcast that has continued to see me through these crazy, scary times. Oh that's so sweet.
Thank you, Yeah, yeah, thank you, And I'm so glad that we could. I'm so glad that we could be there. Yes, just like, listen, you're telling me about this coolbasnik on a road trip. That sounds so good, like yeahs like such a good road trip food, like all the time food, but on a road trip, right, Yeah, meat pies are one of my favorite things for a road trip, like a handheld meat pie. And but those are also kind
of difficult to get in the United States. And so yeah, this sort of thing so good, so good, And you know we love regional things like this, so thank you for writing it, yes, and we both hope that we did not I share those pronunciations too hard, yes, yes, and thank you for writing in pronunciations as you probably know all listeners probably know. Sometimes that's hard to gauge, but we appreciate it nonetheless. Gosh, one day I think an episode on this is oh oh absolutely, yeah, that's
such a fun story. Yes, And they're like, what it's our ref on it? Be quiet, I love eat your snacks. They're like, no, we knew what we were doing. How dare you? Oh well, thank you so much M for writing in. If you would like to write to us listeners, you can You can email us at Hello at savorpod dot com. We're also on social media.
You can find us on Blue Sky and Instagram at savor pod, and we do hope to hear from you. Savor is production of my Heart Radio or more podcasts. For my Heart Radio, you can visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you.
Listen to your favorite shows. Thanks us always to our super producers Dylan Fagan and Andrew Howard. Thanks to you for listening, and we hope that lots more good things are coming your way