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Frito-Lay
1964-1970s
When Doritos launched at Disneyland, the snack came without an official slogan. Americans didn’t know what tortilla chips were, so Frito-Lay tagged them with the phrase Toasted Corn Chips. Which served as a sort of a quasi-slogan. The story goes that a sales VP of Frito-Lay watched a Frontierland restaurant fry leftover tortillas. He came up with the bright idea to package the leftovers and sell them for 19 cents.
1970s
The iconic Nacho Cheese flavored Doritos were introduced in 1972 with the slogan: Taste Doritos! Love Doritos!. The campaign worked. People started calling Doritos “nacho cheese chips.” On a fun sidenote, one factory worker ate so much during quality testing that his skin turned orange for three days. The company limited employee samples after that.
1985-1991
Jay Leno voiced these Doritos commercials before he hosted The Tonight Show. The commercials came with a new slogan, Crunch All You Want. We’ll Make More., which gave people permission to binge on the chips. Sales jumped 23% in the first year. The campaign played on consumer psychology and made them want more and more Doritos.
1991-1993
This phrase launched with 3D Doritos, those puffy pyramids kids used as finger puppets. Focus groups revealed that people made specific faces before biting into Doritos. The marketing team filmed hundreds of these “pre-crunch faces” and built the campaign around them. With the tagline Get Your Mouth Ready, highlighted at the end of every scene.
1995-1998
In the mid-’90s, Frito-Lay ran a contest for eating methods. The campaign was called There’s Only One Way to Eat a Dorito. Over 50,000 people sent videos. One guy trained his dog to catch chips mid-air. Another woman built a Rube Goldberg machine that ended with a chip landing in her mouth. Most people thought the winner was the guy who crushed bags and snorted the dust. But Frito-Lay didn’t pick that entry.
2000s
In the early 2000s, Frito-Lay engineers measured Doritos at 63 decibels when crunched. That’s louder than normal conversation. With that scientific insight, they came up with the The Loudest Taste on Earth slogan. Doritos Super Bowl ads showed the crunch interrupting job interviews and marriage proposals. One commercial had a man eating chips during an ultrasound, drowning out the baby’s heartbeat.
2008-2013
The Crash the Super Bowl campaign let ordinary people create commercials for million-dollar prizes and game-day airtime. A 22-year-old named Dave Herbert won the first competition and introduced the “For the Bold phrase. He then quit his job and became a full-time director. His commercial cost $2,000 to make. The contest ran for ten years and generated 36,000 submissions.
2015-2019
Mountain Dew partnered with Doritos to create Dewitos, a Mountain Dew-flavored chip with the slogan: Another Level. But test markets hated it. Executives pretended it never existed. The phrase stuck around on bags until 2019, long after the snack was discontinued.
2019
A Twitter joke played on Cool Ranch having a temperature identity crisis. Doritos took notice and renamed the flavor “Cooler Ranch” in some markets for six months. They played along with the joke by coming up with a temporary slogan: Cool Ranch Is Now Cooler Ranch. But sales stayed the same. And Frito-Lays went back to basics.
2023-Present
Most recently, Frito-Lay launched silent Doritos for gamers who stream. Engineers spent six months making a softer crunch. Marketers came up with Crunch Cancellation to try to sell it. Early tests failed because chips broke apart and created a choking hazard. The final version cut the crunch volume by 5 decibels. The marketing for the product continues to be used by the chip brand.
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