Doritos against food waste?
‘Little golden things’ is the translation of the globally popular multifunctional snack Doritos. As usual, there is disagreement about who came up with them. But not about why: Doritos started out as little no-food-waste things.
There are several stories about the origins of the crispy corn chips known as Doritos. And, as with most food classics, there are different camps when it comes to these golden little things too.
Team Disney
Team Disney likes to tell the story that chip producer Frito-Lay opened the Mexican-themed Casa de Fritos restaurant when the very first Disneyland amusement park opened in California in 1955. The restaurant bought its tortillas from a local company. One employee noticed that so many stale tortillas ended up in the garbage. He suggested turning them into chips by cutting them into pieces and frying them.
Other stories within this camp point to a Frito-Lay executive as the inventor. In any case, they became a success and were on sale in Californian shops under the name Doritos in 1964. Two years later, Frito-Lay rolled them out across North America.
Disneyland California now appears to have been a fertile breeding ground for popular foods, such as the Monte Cristo sandwich. But chip giant Frito-Lay unfortunately has nothing concrete in its archives to confirm these stories.
Team Carranza
And then there is Team Rebecca Webb Carranza. This Mexico-born entrepreneur is said to have started baking tortilla pieces as early as the late 1940s at her Southern Californian tortilla factory, El Zarape. At the time, this factory was the first to automate the tortilla production process. Fifty years later, Webb Carranza was still telling interviewers that tortillas that were bent or not perfectly round were thrown away. For a family celebration, she once cut them into pieces and fried them. The family reacted so enthusiastically that Webb Carranza soon began producing and selling them at her factory under the name Tort Chips.
Team Zeitgeist
And then there is Team Zeitgeist: most things simply emerge in different places more or less simultaneously, influenced by the spirit of the times. What these stories teach us, at least, is that the golden little things were already intended as a solution to food waste back then. And that makes emptying a bag of them in the current zeitgeist feel a lot better.
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