Thread by @TrungTPhan

Since the early-1990s, PepsiCo has sold $1B+ of Doritos a year.

Why is the chip so addictive? From the ingredients to cooking method to texture, its engineered to pull all the psychological levers to make you crave the snack.

Here’s a breakdown 🧵

Doritos are a good way to understand junk food. For ages, humans have taken natural ingredients and processed them to be more addictive:

◻️Grapes to wine
◻️Coca leaves to cocaine
◻️Opium poppy to heroin

This is a helpful way to help understand "corn to Doritos".

A common junk food trait is the combination of fat and sugar. In nature, these compounds are rarely found combined.

There are a myriad of ways to mix them in standard cooking but the snack industry turned the combo of sugar and fat into a science.

Here are 6 ways Doritos do it:

#1 - Ideal fat content

Speaking of fat and sugar, Doritos have nearly a perfectly balanced mix.

The top 2 ingredients are corn (carb) and vegetable oils (fat). The calories in a Doritos chip is split almost exactly 50/50 between carb and fat (each bag has 3 ears of corn).

#2 - Cooking method

Humans have developed a craving for compounds that come out of the cooking process. Doritos satisfies this craving by hitting you with multiple levels of cooking:

◻️the corn kernels are boiled
◻️corn mashed into paste
◻️corn chip toasted + deep fried

#3 - Seasoning

A Doritos chip is dusted w/ a long list of flavour enhancers:

◻️MSG
◻️Sugar, Salt
◻️disodium inosinate / guanylate
◻️garlic/pepper/tomato/onion powder

This mix is called “non-specific aroma”. No flavor is dominant enough to cause satiety (feeling full).

#4 - Salivation

Doritos have lactic and citric acid. Both of these acids get your saliva flowing, which increase your desire to eat.

You know what else makes you salivate? Cheese, and Doritos has a ton including romano, cheddar and parmesan (it uses milk from 10k cows a year).

#5 - Contrasting texture

A Doritos bite starts with a crunch.

But it quickly dissolves in your mouth.

This is a phenomenon known as “vanishing caloric density”. The feeing of food “vanishingly in your mouth signals to the brain that you “need” more.

#6 - The Finale

Doritos ingredients are combined in a process known as "flour grinding", which creates a very fine powder.

The powder completely covers the chip and leaves a dusting on your fingers. That finger dust is 5x more concentrated and is one helluva way to end a bag.

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Sources

NYT: archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.co…

Unwrapped:

UCol: journals.plos.org/plosone/articl…

Sure Dividend: suredividend.com/pepsicos-23-bi…

Insider: businessinsider.com/why-doritos-ar…

A versino of Doritos that only had this level of dust would be a $100B a year business:

Best non-traditional Doritos flavours I’ve ever had:

— Ketchup
— Shrimp (Don’t @ me)

Here’s recipe for home-made Doritos mix: thetakeout.com/homemade-dorit…

No lies detected