Hello, and welcome to Savior production of Buyhart Radio.
I'm Annie Reese and I'm Lauren Vogelbaum, and today we have a classic episode for you about cheese curls, mostly Cheetos, but also generic brands.
I did have to clarify this point earlier because I was like, wait, I don't remember doing an episode on cheese curls, and then seconds later I was like, oh, Cheetos, Cheetos.
You mean Cheetos, Uh huh, yep, cheesypoofs, you know the whole thing.
Yeah.
Yeah, this one is from September of twenty eighteen, and we were so chipper. I almost didn't want to run this episode because we are so chipper here, and I'm like, is this appropriate? Is this appropriate for our modern times?
I think people could use some chipper? Yeah? Yeah, yeah.
And as I said to you, we talked about a video game, a branded video.
Game with Chester Cheetah Oh yeah, and I think.
You know, if that brings anyone joy like it did me, we should do it.
Yeah. Oh yeah, yeah, No, this is a this is a joyous episode there. I mean, from the way that they're made to all of these weird marketing details, it's a. It's a thing of beauty, so forgive our perky tone.
Yeah.
It also made me think of our super producer Dylan and that brings me joy.
Oh yeah, yeah, because he is a he's a cheetoh genius. He eats them with chopsticks as so to avoid getting the dust everywhere.
Yes, yes, excellent, excellent stuff. Was there any particular reason this one was on your mind to bring back Lord?
Nope, it was just it was in the archive. I was like, oh, that was a fun one. Here we are, yeah, here we are. Although there is some recent Cheetos news that I would like to share with you. So just this month, March of twenty twenty five, still a really weird number to me.
Okay.
So there was a flame and hot Cheeto that someone found that has shaped more or less like the Pokemon Charizard. Okay, and it's sold at auction this month for nearly ninety thousand dollars like eighty seven thousand something wow for auction. It was packaged on this custom Pokemon card and labeled Cheeto's Ard, which has one hundred and twenty HP if you if you need to know that, if that helps
you in any way. There were some sixty bits on it, and the auctions description explained that this cheeto and I quote was initially discovered and preserved sometime between twenty eighteen and twenty twenty two. The cheeto surged in popularity on social media platforms in late twenty twenty four.
Okay, how much do you want to bet either Dylan or Andrew superproducers were involved in this? Both?
I hope, I mean yeah, although I would hope that they would tell us about it if they had. You know, I don't want to learn from Google. That's rude.
Yes, well, let us know.
I do have a friend who loves both Cheetos and Charis Art, so I should chick in with her as well.
It does, you know, Like I don't always I don't always like see the image in the clouds that people are talking about with things like this, but it does. It does look like Charis Aard, like for like a flick from a profile.
Yeah.
I also love that the preserved sometime between twenty eighteen and twenty twenty.
That's a large crow. That's a large range.
It makes it sound like a fossil, which I love.
Has anyone radiocarbon dated this cheetos ared right.
I mean, see, it's hard not to be chipper about Cheeto, dude.
It is.
Oh heck, all right, Well.
I guess we should let former Annie and Lauren take it away.
Hello, and welcome to food Stuff.
I'm Anniris and I'm Lauren vocal Bomb, and today we're talking about cheat and other cheese puffs, cheeseypoofs, whatever you want to call them.
I did keep calling them cheesypoofs. That's from South Park, Yeah.
As we learned in the fictional trivia thing. I mean also from watching the show. But I think that's why it's been on my mind.
Ah.
Yes, there's a lot of things to say about Cheetohs.
There is that. This episode was inspired by our super producer Dylan and his Cheeto genius. He eats Cheetoh's chopsticks. It keeps everything nice and clean and neat. He's doing it currently, he is right this very.
Moment, and it is delightful. Yes, So I want to start out with a question. Do you know the game A Jack in the Bucks?
I believe we've played it in line for rides at Disney World.
Oh that was heads up?
Oh, okay, okay, sorry.
Man, we did get a lot of enjoyment out of that.
But I am familiar with the game Jack in the Box.
It's like a series of games, sure, but you play it usually on your phone with other people in the room, and all the phones connect to the TV.
And there's one that is sort of.
Like a March Madness brackets thing where people vote to determine what being in the bracket should advance. And one of the competitions or questions is around the sexiest mascot, and Chester of the Cheetos always wins, no contest, no one votes for anyone else. And I've pondered it sometimes I'm like, I mean, I.
Suppose, you know, as Chester himself might say, it's not easy being cheesy.
No, we know. Every time we record we know the battle. Also another cultural thing I want to mention is super disilted Dads. The taste of loneliness is the parody brand on thirty Rock. That's what Liz Lemon eats when she's sad or you know, upset or just in general because she's usually pretty oh yeah yeah, Baseline a little bit, a little bit upset at people.
Yeah, I love it. I love it. But all right, Cheetos, what is.
It Cheetos are a name brand of cheese puffs, which are a snack made of puffed corn dough that's either baked or fried and then coated in either dehydrated cheese or a cheese flavored.
Powder cheese flavored powder, cheese.
Flavored powdered yes, depending on your level of actual cheese, and there there's certain marketing restrictions on what you can actually call something.
Love it.
Yeah. Cheese puffs, by the way, here are are not to be confused with gagere, which are French pastry puff bites that are made with just an impressive amount of grey are cheese and are so delicious, so good. Sometimes they come stuffed with things.
Yes, oh oh, indeed.
Yeah, it's like cheese flavored chew and it's just so good.
Anyway, Yes, we must move on.
We do that. It's all who other episode about puff pastry at some point in the future. I'm a little bit intimidated by it in a baking and a science standpoint, but we're gonna come back to it. Meanwhile, Cheetos, Yeah, how they're made is great. I'm really excited about this because they're because they're basically a different form of popcorn.
What yoh, oh, I couldn't be more on board.
You start, You start the cheeto process with three simple ingredients and one kind of complicated one corn meal, water, oil, and flavor coating.
Flavor coating.
The flavor coating will come back to you later. But okay, so did you listen to or perhaps, if you're Annie and sitting across from me, participate in our popcorn episode.
I just listened to it on refeat at night and over heart dreaming of what.
Could be.
All right if you if you did listen, or if you listen every night, you might remember that corn kernels contain a mix of proteins and starches that, when heated with a little bit of moisture under pressure, will gelatinize. Yeah, they turn into this kind of kind of fun goo. If you release the pressure, the goo will rapidly expand into a foam that cools at room temperature into a solid fluff. A kernel of popcorn is its own little pressure
cooker when it's heated up. But when you've got corn meal, you've got to provide the pressure along with the temperature in order to create this puffing scenario. So therefore, cheese puffs are extruded. Extrusion is a scary sounding word, but it just means that you've got a machine that lets you push dough through a tube with a dye or a mold on the end to create different shapes, like
a playdough machine. Oh yeah, except in this case, your playdough machine is filled with corn meal and just a little bit of water, and it heats this mixture up to just about the boiling point of water, and there's this screw on the inside of the pipe that shears the hot corn meal against the sides of the tube, creating enough pressure that the water boils and the corn
meal gelatinizes. So when it goes through that die at the end into the relatively cool and low pressure environment that we call normal air, the goo expands into foam and cools to a solid in a split second. And the shape of the dye and the way that you cut the dough as it comes out will determine the shape of your cheese puff. And I'm actually somehow downplaying
how completely rad this is. That the machine is moving fast enough and at high enough pressure that when the puffs come out, they actually fly three feet through the air and hit this net or cage that drops them down onto a belt to go on through the rest of the process.
Ah, I see a video of this so badly.
Yes, but we're not done yet.
There's more.
Yes, there's more for flavor and crunch and to reduce the amount of moisture left in the puffs. You know, you don't want a soggy Cheeto. The puffs will move through either a fryer or an oven. Cheetos are generally fried unless they say baked on the package, and then they're probably baked.
Yeah, weird.
Then they're ready for flavor.
Oh.
They'll either be spritsed with oil and then tossed with dry seasonings, or, in the case of Cheetos, sent into this tumbler drum that simultaneously tosses them and also sprays them with this pre mixed oil plus seasonings kind of stuff. This drum is called a flavor reel. By the way, our e favor Our e e L flavor reel.
Hmmm.
I love everything about this. The coated puffs are allowed to dry out, and they're packaged, and the entire process of creating this packaged product takes like less than twenty minutes.
I have some kind of weird desire to just like stand and fill the net and be pelted with ga Almost.
That is slightly strange, but.
I want to be in like a beekeeping soup. I don't know what this says about.
Me, Lauren, I don't know.
I can't deny that it sounds delightful. I just want to spread my arms wide and just receive, receive the corn puff goodness.
Yeah. Yeah, as wacky as it all is, it is this highly scientific process. You have to get the just the right moisture content in the original corn meal itself, and also once you add the water, and also throughout
the whole process, and also when you're packaging it. Cheetos has an in house lab that analyzes the chemical composition of their product once every thirty minutes wow, and then once every four hours, a panel of four tasters will inspect a sample, comparing it to reference Cheetos that are flown in by the powers that be. It is so scientific, fantastic reference Cheetos. Who gets to be the tasters? It's just like a job you chained for your whole life.
I think it is.
The rocky theme is planning and you're like dinner, dinner, eating cheetahs.
I didn't ask. There's no one that I could ask.
Okay, if you know right in yes please.
There's also a recipe for making your own up on splendid Table. It involves steaming tapioca and corn flour dough for an hour, dehydrating pieces of it for up to ten hours, and then deep frying them.
Wow.
I was almost scared to link this because I feel like you're gonna go do it.
Yeah, yeah, and I suspect it won't go well for me, but you know, I won't know until I try exactly like a very big, broad shruggy gesture.
In terms of nutrition, mm hmm, baked baked cheese puffs aren't too bad for you, but the fried one's uh, nutritionally speaking, you know, they're mostly oil and simple carbohydrates. You know, it's just fat and like the specific type of sugars that carb sugars that get you like a little bit high. Oh, I mean, not like high high, but they just perk you up real quick.
Okay.
So it's a very pleasurable thing to eat along with salt, which you know also gives you a little bit of a that's delicious. Some of the other ingredients listed on your typical cheese puff package are vitamins and minerals that actually get leeched from the corn meal during processing and thus are added back in so that your snack isn't like completely nutritional avoid So that's nice. Yeah, yeah, But what I'm saying is that you know, they feel like a treat, and they should be treated as.
Treats, treated as a treat all right around the world. There are all kinds of brands of cheese puffs, like Twisties and what's Its, But the leading brand of cheese puffs I keep wanting to call them cheeseyproofs is Freedo Laths Cheetos, which boasted four billion in annual sales in
twenty thirteen. And to make a year's supply of Cheetos pepsi co needs five thousand cows to get the eleven million gallons of milk two hundred gallons per cow to make the ten million pounds of cheddar cheese for that cheesy powder.
More and how that cheesey powder is made. In the middle of our history section.
Yeah, twenty two countries produced Cheetos, making all kinds of flavors, from pepsi to peanut butter.
Oh No.
Drillis did a rather in death look into the serving sizes of nine types of chip snack things and found that Cheetos regularly gives customers more than the serving size on the back indicates. One hundred and eighty nine is what it probably says in the back, but what you're more likely to get is something closer to two hundred and thirty seven and a half, and Cheetos was declared the vale winner of all the others at point zero zero eight dollars I guess cents per chip. Uh.
Interestingly, baby boomers are the first generation whose intake of snacks did not decline as they hit middle age, but increased.
Interesting.
Indeed, I think it has something to do with our snack habits overall.
Probably twenty sixteen is sometimes known as the year of the Cheeto. It appeared in loads of fast food items like casadas, burritos, or as the coating on chicken tenders, the scientific marvel.
That is Burger Kings, mac and Cheeto's.
They were hailed as the new Torito, which I love that because I don't know what that means.
What oh wars peace, I don't know.
Is the doo.
Nothing makes sense anymore, but the cheto speaking of making sense or not as a very perhaps a surprising history, it does.
And we will get into that just as soon as we get back from a quick break for a word from our sponsor.
And we're back. Thank you, Spencer, Yes, thank you. All right, So we owe our thanks.
For cheese curls cheese puffs puffs to an animal feed manufacturer in Wisconsin in nineteen thirty.
Five animal feed, animal feed. Mm hm, yep. I'm not gonna explain more. I'm gonna let you wonder about it.
Perfect.
No, I have to explain everything because I love it. Okay.
So, when this manufacturer is making the feed, and grinder flaked the corn, and in order to clean the grinder works would feed the machine damp corn, which made these poofy corn things aka corn puffs. One of the employees took them home and dried them out, and when he didn't die, he found the flavor and texture quite pleasing actually, and he suggested that the company sell them for human consumption under the name corn curls with ks, which they did after changing the name of the company to you
know shake. The history of you know, animal feed Yeah, we're an animal feed company, but now we're feeding you humans. The Elmer Candy Corporation lays claim to creating the first cheese curl, the cheeweese as well, and the cheese doodle. Cheese with the Z was a popular snack produced in New York and it came onto the scene in the fifties. But when it comes to Cheetos, they were the invention
of Ce Doolan in nineteen forty eight. Doolan was born in Kansas City, Kansas, in nineteen oh thirty, but his family moved to Texas when he was quite young. His father was an inventor, and the young Dulan worked at his father's auto repair shop and the confectionery that the
family owned. He was looking for a new snack and he responded to an ad in the San Antonio Express for a fried corn chip recipe an adapted potato riser and that's not all nineteen retail accounts too, and Dulan got all of this for a cool one hundred bucks. Then massa was pushed through the riser and then snipped into ribbons and fried in oil.
These chips were named.
Frido's and in nineteen thirty two, the Freedo company got its start. It grew relatively quickly, five plants by nineteen forty seven, and they made other snacks as well.
Friedo wasn't the only thing. Doulan was behind innovations.
And practices like store door delivery or having the company salespeople do the stocking of their product clip racks who was behind that. He experimented with canned foods and toes and fast food, opening one of the first tex mex fast food places in the country and the first place in Dallas to have a microwave as it was.
Called at the time raidar range Wow.
He came up with cup shaped fried tortilla shells. Another thing he did was invest in Disneyland in its early stages. When it opened in nineteen fifty five, Disneyland featured a restaurant of Doolands called Cosasa.
Free Does.
Kind of ironically, I guess he was a big health nut and kept up to date with health advancements and trends, and he tried to translate that into his products. He went on to join the Texas Department of Agriculture, which later developed a corn hybrid that was used in Freedo's.
Both he and his.
Father did so much more like this is very very condensed, but reading it was one of those times where I was like, what you did this much stuff?
Really?
Also, and how did you You must have gotten up very early in the morning.
Exactly, But that's kind of the gist Cheetos, though, Dulan was looking to make a snack that wouldn't ghost stale, and he got his inspiration from corn chips, and he conducted several experiments with his kids as the test subjects. That's a theme that we're seeing coming up a lot. And he did first come up with the recipe for Fredo's and then later Cheetos. He got inspiration for an adaption to dairy preservative technique from the US Army's dehydrated cheese, so in a way, US.
Army is also responsible for Cheetos.
Yep. The Army placed a huge order for World War One, buying twenty five million quarter pound tens of processed cheese from Craft, and this is what catapulted Craft to what it is now at least one of the big things. Point being, the Army was big cheese fans and was always looking for a way to do more with less. In nineteen forty three, a USDA dairy scientist by the name of George Sanders came up with the first cheese powder.
At the time, the military was a little mad with the powers of dehydration. You know, water is heavy, heavy, is expensive to ship. If you dehydrate your food, you can ship way more of it, be it vegetables, potatoes, eggs,
or cheese. So they were funding all kinds of people who were working on all these dehydration technologies at the time, including the aforementioned craft and the USDA, and cheese for a long time was considered impossible to dehydrate because the heat used in dehydration would melt the cheese and separate the fats from the milk solids. But Sanders developed a method of drying shredded cheese at low temperatures to create this protective crust not just around the shreds of cheese,
but around the molecules themselves within the shreds. The shreds could then be ground and dehydrated at closer to a usual temperature. And this, obviously, like getting a packet of dehydrated cheese, wouldn't really be the same thing as you know sending a soldier like a hunk of cheese to eat like with your hand, But it was useful for cooking and flavoring.
And when the war ended, the Army had all of these wartime contracts and excess food to figure out in a way that wouldn't calls companies to collapse or maybe even industries. One of the things they did was sell back dehydrated cheese at like a third of the price, and a lot of companies snapped it up. It was cheap, we'll find a way, We'll find something to do with it later, including the Freedo Company, which debuted the Cheeto Dusted with Army Dehydrated Cheese in nineteen forty eight.
Yeah, and meanwhile, during the war, Freedo was a supplier of chips to the military, which sort of like craft, helped increase the band's reach and positioned it as a national business.
In nineteen sixty one, the Freedo Company merge with Hwla and Company, and in nineteen sixty five they merged with Pepsi Co.
A couple of.
Different flavors were tried, but really none stuck around at first, apart from the Cheesy. In nineteen seventy one, no new flavors until nineteen ninety two, and Flaming Hot Cheetos.
All flaming Hot Cheetos.
They are a favorite around the office.
I don't necessarily understand it, but Dylan looks like he's dreaming right now, and.
The story behind them is pretty great. Richard Montagnees was a janitor at the California Plants, a Freedo plant. He had dropped out of high school in part because he spoke little English at the time, and when he got a job at the Frido lay plant, he took the advice of his grandfather, quote, make sure that floor shines and let them know that A. Montaignes mopped it, and
Montagnees did. As he was working, he started to notice that there were products catering to Latinos, and one day, due to a breakdown in the machinery, Montagnez procured some Cheetohs before they got that coating of cheese powder, and he took them home and added chili powder in its place. He got the idea, I believe he saw some elotes
and he was like, Aha, let me try this. Oh yeah, and this habit was adopted by his friends and family, who encouraged him to share the idea of this idea of his with the CEO, and Montaignees did calling up the CEO directly.
He didn't realize that wasn't really a thing you did.
But the CEO heard him out and gave him two weeks to prepare for a presentation. And Montagnez wasn't sure what a presentation to a CEO should be sure, but with the help of his wife, they checked out library books on marketing, They designed bags and manually made one hundred packages, and during the presentation, when he was asked about how much market share they could get, Montaigne says he sort of spread his arms wide and said this.
Much, which I love.
The CEO was like, okay, yeah, sure, And now it's a best selling flavor. And Montagnees is the executive VP of Multicultural Sales for PepsiCo North America. He's been named one of the most influential Hispanic leaders in America by Fortune five hundred and Newsweek, and he teaches NBA classes at a college close to his home. When a student asked how he was teaching without a PhD, Montagnees responded, I do have a PhD.
I have been poor, hungry and determined.
Aw and last I heard Fox Searchlight was.
Is making a movie about him? Yes, yeah, and yes these things have a huge following.
Half flamanhat cheetahs.
Yes, yes, Katie Perry dressed is one for what I'm guessing Salloween, but you know it could have been anything. There's a rap song about them, school kids love them, and they qualify as smart snacks here in the US, the whole grain kind with a less salt and less oil do anyway, So that's the flaming hot Cheetos and their success reopen the door to new flavors and a lot of interesting ones.
I have to say.
Yeah, there are twenty one flavors in North America, like salsa, conquiso, bacon, cheddar, alapino, extra flaming Hot Cheetos. In Japan, you can are could get pepsi flavored, like we mentioned at the top, Mountain dew flavored cheetos. Pepsi might sound like an odd flavor of chips, but despite this, or maybe because of it, Americans rushed to eBay for samples. One review read quote it created a carbonated sensation when you eat them, kind of like pop rocks. If pop Rocks came in blindingly
citrus like flavor. China wasn't big into Cheeto It's probably because of the general lack of cheese and Chinese diet. So six hundred flavors were tested in focus groups before a sort of pop corny flavor called Savory American Cream was declared the winner. Okay, Savory American Cream. In nineteen seventy one, Cheeto's debuted their mascot to the public.
A mouse, A mouse, A mouse.
Yes. The first mascot was the Cheeto's mouse. You can still find old commercials with him online. Cheese that Goes Crunch was the slogan. He was very like calm. He was just like, you know, don't you want to try some cheese that goes crunch? Very different than the current mascot, Chester the Cheetah. And he was introduced in the mid eighties. And we have to talk about Chester for a second. I'm sorry we have to because it ain't easy be and cheesy.
And he's dangerously cheesy and we can relate. He was cool that we can't really do well.
He had sunglasses, he had lace up sneakers. Daffy Duck was his stunt double one cool dude, cool enough for Pepsi Coo to want to give him his own Saturday Morning.
Cartoon the proposed name Yo It's the Chester Cheetah Show, but.
Groups were worried about the impact of essentially a commercial on kids' brains, and they fought successfully to keep it off the air.
I do still, I mean Transformers, Gee.
Joe, Oh yeah, my Little Pony. I mean like the Super Mario Brothers Super Show. Like come on, guys, Like, if you guys let all of that through. What could have possibly gone wrong with Yo It's the Chester Cheta Show.
Nothing, Nothing could have come wrong and kind of unrelated the name of the craft brand Mac and Cheese.
The mascot is Cheese a source Rex and he too also had a show at the same time that was shot down.
Oh I'm just picturing like a super group, oh Cheese mascots. Sure, Maybe Chuck E Cheese could yes, yeah, oh man picturing something very like adventures.
Or yeah, yeah, I think that.
For our our other side project that will one day happen, the Dunker. Perhaps they could be a like boy band cheat because Cheese as sores drugs has got the oh sure jazz thing happening. Yeah, Chester seems like he'd sing.
I think he could play guitar. He seems like the kind of cat, one cool cat.
Who's there for the ride. That is a young Hercules reference.
Probably don't seen that show, but there were a lot of Cheeto's commercials in the breaks of that show.
I remember, And some of these commercials.
Might have been for things like Cheeto Pause, which I kind of remember, but they were discontinued in nineteen ninety three, or maybe the X's and O's they were discontinued in two thousand, or the Pizza Puffs were discontinued in two thousand and six, the Twist discontinued in twenty twelve.
Are the Mystery colors? Do you remember the Mystery I don't, and I'm sort of glad they're like bright green I'm picturing like Skittles colors but on Cheetos.
Kind of perfect.
Kind of yup that all of those probably not that won't surprise anyone, but all of them have Facebook groups trying to bring them back, like petitions come back. Especially I think the X's and O's or the Pause, one of those two has like a really big Facebook group in two thousand and nine, a Cheeto that allegedly looked like Michael Jackson moonwalking was available on eBay, and the seller claimed he found it the week before Jackson died and that this increased the value. Allegedly, it sold for
thirty five dollars Wow. That same year, which seemed to be a big year in finding oddly shaped cheetos, a couple in Texas found a Cheeto shaped like Jesus, which newspapers dubbed Jesus There you go, I nod in approval. In twenty twelve, a Colorado governor brought up Cheetos when trying to keep the public from getting their hopes up when it came to cannabis legalization. Quote, the voters have
spoken and we have to respect their will. This will be a complicated process, but we intend to follow through that said. Federal law still says marijuana is an illegal drug, so don't break out the Cheetos or goldfish too quickly, and voters in Colorado sent cheetos to his office when
cannabis was legalized in the state. And also in twenty twelve, a flying bag of Cheetos caused a bra at a high school in indianatudents were waiting outside to get into the school and a bag of Cheetos hit the assistant principle in the head, and the assistant principal accused a student and the student denied it, and things escalated from there. The student attacked the assistant principle and the superintendent described
it leslie. Cheetos went flying everywhere. As to whether or not the bag was thrown at them or white was thrown in that general direction, we're looking into cheeto mysteries. In twenty thirteen, the world's largest cheeto, the product of what Freedo Lay called a seasoning accumulation, went on eBay with bids of over a million dollars before eBay shut it down for fraudulent bidding. The Cheeto of discoverer donated it to a small town in Iowa where tourists could
look at it through plexiglass. I don't know if it's still there, but if it is and you've seen it, listeners, please send in pictures.
Yeah.
In twenty fourteen, a Colorado man stabbed his brother in an argument that started with cheetos getting dumped onto a bed. This sounds a lot like an argument my siblings would have without the stabbing. But yeah, you put something on my bed, we're gonna get in a fight. Both are okay and claim that the fight was over stupid stuff.
Is Cheetahs stuff ever? Stupid stuff?
I don't know or in one of the philosophical questions of our time, kind of an aside, Sweetoes, which are cinnamon sugar sweet Cheetos came out in twenty fifteen, and this is when the Cheetoh's store opened, where one of the items available is a makeup bronzer, so you can achieve that vibrant Cheetos glow.
Oh boy, that's a lot. Yeah.
Another fun thing about Cheetos they are a good fighter, fire starter or tender.
Not because of anything to do with the cheese powder. Like I think that the assumption is that there's some like weird chemical the cheese coating that makes the extra flammable. No, it's the fact that they're fried in oil. They have a lot of oil in them, and oil is a little bit flammable, just a little bit. Yeah.
But now you know, if you're ever in the woods you start a fire, be careful, don't do it unless you know what you're doing. But if you have a bag of Cheetos.
Yeah, it can't hurt. Oh, it can hurt.
Hurt.
Never take my advice. We have a little bit of Cheetos marketing science for you. But first we've got one more quick break for a word from our sponsor, and we're back. Thank you, sponsor, Yes, thank you. Also special things to producer Dylan who during the ad break, because we do frequently talk during the ad break as though we need to literally take one that although there was no there was no Chester Sheeta cartoon, there was a video game called Too Cool to Fool.
Yes, and there were no mentions of Cheetos in the game because it's too cool to fool.
Yeah. But speaking of fooling people, yeah, with snacks. Okay, So there's there's a term in the snacks market, and that the getting people to eat more market at large, which also includes, for example, the military when it's you know, trying to make sure that soldiers actually eat. There's a term called sensory specific satiety, and basically this means that when a particular flavor or sensation that you get from a food is big enough, it overwhelms your brain and
at first that's a cool thing. You're like, cool, yes, I like I like this, but quickly your brain goes, oh, okay, enough of that. And so what processed food manufacturers are doing when they design a food is trying to make their foods interesting enough to crave, but not so exciting
that your brain feels full of that thing. They'll test different formulas with like normal human taste testers, and record what recipes folks don't like versus what they like okay versus what they like the most, and it's often a bell curve where some formula in the middle is that bliss point of flavor.
Oh.
When researching for The New York Times circa twenty thirteen an article that would become the Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk, food writer Michael Moss consulted with a food scientist by the name of Stephen Witherly and about Cheetos like out of a whole bag of snacks, Werly picked out the Cheetohs and said, this is one of the most marvelously constructed foods on the planet in terms of pure pleasure.
And this has something to do with with a balanced flavor formula, but also with the way that Cheetos melt in your mouth. After that initial crunch, it tricks your brain into feeling like there's nothing to it and that it's okay to keep eating more.
Very chicky.
Indeed, that New York Times article, by the way, makes it sound like a lot of the food scientists who are involved with these companies experience like kind of a lot of guilt over their work and its impact on the health of the general public.
Yeah. I remember when this was first coming out and a lot of people were talking about it and hearing some of the people involved expressing so much guilt about it.
Yeah.
But on a related note, hope is not totally lost because researchers are always looking at ways to make these craveable foods healthier, you know, from the type of food coloring used, to the types of oil used, to the actual physical batter. There was one study out of Washington State University that added to the corn meal in an extruder dried carrot pulp, which is a waste product left
over from juicing carrots. Once extruded, the puffs were even puffier than usual and the taste was unchanged and the pulp added a little bit of like fiber vitamins. So could the future hold healthier cheese puffs.
I like to think so me too. Thanks science, First, you make this what marvelous construction of on health. Now perhaps perhaps you make it healthier healthier. Yeah, but that's our Cheetos cheese puff but mostly Cheetos episodes. Yeah, I would love to know the different brands from different countries. I know we mentioned that two at the topic, and those are from the UK and Australia. But yeah, in other countries, if you have different flavors of Cheetos one or different types.
Of oh yeah puffs.
Yeah, and if they've got terrific brand names like the woltz It. Yeah, it's so good.
Yeah, let us know, yes, please let us know.
And that brings us to the end of this classic episode. We hope that you got as much joy out of listening to it or re listening to it as we did.
It's such a fun one.
Oh yeah, oh yeah, And like y'all, like we are going to have to do a whole episode about Flame and Hot Cheetos. The movie that we mentioned was produced. It came out in twenty twenty three. It was Evil Longoria's feature film directorial debut. It's called Flame and Hot and is available on Hulu Slash Disney Plus if you want to go watch it. I have not, but it received an OSCAR nomination for Best Original Song. But Barbie beat it, which happens.
I suppose.
There's also been layers of investigation into the whole story, like questioning its exact veracity, And I just want to say that in this deeply confusing time, I am here for the Cheeto discourse. Me too.
Yeah, we must get to the bottom of this. We need to save your team as symbol. We've got to get to the bottom.
So yeah, future future episode, future flame and hot episode cut forthcoming.
Yes, yes, well, listeners, let us know if you've got tips anywhere. We should look at any cheese curl Cheetos recipes. But yes, if you would like to email us, please do. You can 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 a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, you can visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Thanks, as 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.