How Doritos predicted the future of food
The Doritos people all over the world know and love, and gobble four at a time, almost never happened.
The Doritos Arch West used to seduce his fellow executives, and that would hit store shelves in 1964, were exactly like the ones West tasted in California, just salted tortilla chips - "toasted corn taste" is how they were billed on the packaging.
But the rest of the country didn't know what to make of them. Doritos sounded Mexican, but they didn't taste Mexican. This was a problem.
West didn't give up. Instead, he uttered the word that changed everything. Make Doritos, he said, taste like a "taco."
As his son Jack West recounts, the Frito-Lay executives chided the fancy New York pitchman for "not knowing the difference between a 'thing' and a 'flavor'."
But West already knew that the line between things and flavors could be blurred, that technology existed that could impose the flavor of a taco on a fried triangle of corn.
"Of course, you and I know that," he fired back, "but the rest of the country north of here sure doesn't. And that's our market."
And what a market. The Northeast, the Northwest, the South, and the Southwest - everyone loved taco-flavored Doritos.
They loved them so much that four years later, Frito-Lay blurred the line between thing and flavor once again, this time with Doritos that tasted like nacho cheese.
In 1986, Cool Ranch - a tortilla chip flavored like salad dressing - was born. By 2010, the chip beloved by everyone from toddlers and teenagers to stoners and the infirm was earning Frito-Lay $5 billion a year.
The Dorito didn't just predict the future of tortilla chips. It didn't just predict the future of snack food, either. It predicted the future of all food.
Nothing tastes like what it is anymore. Everything tastes like what we want it to taste like. As food gets blander, we crank out zestiness by the hundreds of tons to make up for it.
It's happening to blueberries, chicken breast, broccoli, and lettuce, even fennel. Everything is getting blander and simultaneously more seasoned. Everything is becoming like a Dorito.
The birth of Doritos was a watershed moment. Flavor wasn't up to Mother Nature anymore. Now it was in the hands of the folks in marketing.
Excerpted from "The Dorito Effect" by Mark Schatzker with permission from Simon & Schuster.