Adrianne: This is Underunderstood.
John: Hello friends.
Regina: Hi John.
Billy: Hey.
Adrianne: Hello.
John: Okay. So when I was a kid…well, are you guys familiar with CCD?
Regina: Yes.
John: It was like Sunday school, but not on Sundays. And just before the CCD began, everybody would gather out in the cafeteria at the Catholic church. And since this was like, after school, everybody had their snacks and you could go over to these tables and you could buy these snacks at the side. And I have a really clear memory of getting these doritos that were called Cooler Ranch Doritos.
Regina: Yeah.
John: Until recently I was very firmly convinced that these were always and have still been called Cooler Ranch Doritos. It turns out that’s not true at all. Everyone seems to know these as Cool Ranch Doritos.
Regina: No, I knew them. I knew them as Cooler Ranch.
Adrianne: I thought they were Cooler Ranch and I was always like, why are they cooler? What are they cooler than?
Billy: Wait, I’m sorry, everyone else on this call thinks that they’re called Cooler Ranch Doritos?
Adrianne: Yes, that’s what I thought.
Regina: Yes, that is what I always thought it was strange.
Billy: You’re sure this isn’t like a Mandela effect situation where a bunch of people falsely remember an incorrect detail of something in this case, a brand name? Was it ever Cooler Ranch?
John: Oh, I’m sure it was real, at some point. I’m looking at the Wikipedia page right now for doritos. And if you look for Cool Ranch-
Billy: The proper name.
John: The name Cool Ranch, in 1986, Cool Ranch Doritos made their debut and became popular. Cool Ranch Doritos are sold under the name Cool Original in the UK and are called Cool American elsewhere in Europe as ranch dressing is less common in those places. This article makes-
Adrianne: I’m sorry. I love that idea of ranch being an exotic foreign spice.
John: The word “cooler” only exists on this page in one context and that’s in the context of a Doritos project called Rollitos, which were corn chips shaped into small tubes, and those came in a flavor called Cooler Ranch. There’s no other mention on this page of Doritos ever being called Cooler Ranch, which conflicts directly with my memory of what this flavor is. I’ve thought in recent years when I’ve seen Cool Ranch Doritos that it’s weird- that they renamed it to Cool Ranch rather than Cooler Ranch. But this Wikipedia article for Doritos will have you believe that Cooler Ranch never existed.
Billy: Because it never did.
Regina: No, it definitely did. Three out of four people think this.
John: Well, check this out.
I’ve gone to popular blog Jezebel.com. In an article by C.A. Pinkham on July 17th of 2014, this article is called, Doritos Long, Slow Descent Into Madness. And one of the subheadings in this article is that time they decided to rename Cool Ranch as Cooler Ranch.
“Date of the incident, the early 2000s, I think, does anyone actually have an answer to this? Explanation: In Doritos’ defense, the early aughts were a terrible time for all of us. I tried to figure out when specifically this happened and I came to perhaps not at all the surprising conclusion that Doritos appears to have attempted to expunge all evidence of the Cooler Ranch running from the internet. They appear to have disavowed all knowledge of the time they committed an unspeakable crime against grammar in the name of edgy marketing. You can find images online, like the one that’s over here but they’re in invariably grainy and outdated. I have confirmed the only images of Cooler Ranch you can find are tiny little images.”
They’re basically disapproved or footage of corn chips,
Adrianne: The right to be forgotten.
John: I would like to strip them of that right and find Cooler Ranch Doritos. When were they made? Why were they made? What’s the story here?
I think what happened here was that Frito-Lay renamed Cool Ranch to Cooler Ranch, and then at some point switched it back.
Regina: Why?
Billy: Right. Well, and why, according to this article, did they try to erase all evidence of this from the internet?
John: They’ve done a pretty good job of it.
Billy: Yeah. They got to me, they got that Men in Black blinker right in my face and convinced me that it never existed.
Regina: Mental Floss has a listicle that says Cooler Ranch was a discontinued flavor.
Billy: But there is no good information on how and why and when.
John: Exactly! What was the motivation for this? This is such a weird choice.
I’ve been withholding a vital piece of evidence here guys. I have in my hand, a bag. On the bag, I’ll read you the text of this bag, it says Doritos. Cooler Ranch. Brand flavor.
Billy: Okay. Hold on. Wait, did you buy these at a store?
John: I did not buy these on us at a store. I bought this on eBay.
Regina: Are there Doritos in the bag?
John: Nope. It’s an empty bag. That’s been flattened.
Billy: Damn.
Regina: It sucks because I would really want to do like a blind taste test
Billy: Yes.
Regina: To see if there’s a taste difference between Cool Ranch and Cooler Ranch.
John: It seems like a dangerous test.
Regina: I’m pretty sure those chemicals don’t expire.
Billy: So I’m assuming this is a vintage bag of-
John: Oh Billy, oh Billy. It’s so vintage. Also on the front of this bag of Cooler Ranch Doritos seems like a- I don’t know if it’s a painting or some kind of Photoshopped-ish treatment of a photo of a basketball player named David Robinson. He’s holding what I guess in the original photo was a basketball, but on this bag, it’s the, O, it’s the first O in the word Doritos as if he’s about to dunk that to that O.
Bill: Nice!
John: Yeah. It’s very cool.
Billy: Okay. So he was active from 89 to 2003?
John: Well, yeah, but if you look at this bag, it’s actually promoting the 1996 Olympic basketball team. So we can kind of pinpoint this to one single point in time. We at least know that Cooler Ranch Doritos were being sold in 1996.
So I reached out to the author of that article about Doritos C.A. Pinkham. He used to write a column on Jezebel called Kitchenette, which was all about food.
C.A.: I remember looking everywhere on the internet and being like, “why is there no evidence other than some grainy, Zapruder film, photographs of the existence of Cooler Ranch?” And everywhere I looked it up, it seemed to be the same thing.
Like I’ve had a couple things on Reddit and something else where people were like, “hey, remember when Doritos did this?” And everyone seemed to agree. “Yeah, they did this. Why is there no dates or information about this at all?”
John: What time period? Do you remember these existing? Like, what’s your experience with these?
C.A.: It definitely was early enough that I remember it being Cool Ranch first. And then I remember it being Cooler Ranch. So maybe it was early nineties. This couldn’t have been for that long, like maybe a year or two.
John: I feel like it was more.
C.A.: It might have been-
John: For my own exposure, like to me, it was like the canonical chip was Cooler Ranch for exactly the right time when I would’ve started eating them.
C.A.: I mean, it is amazing what you’re talking about how they just sort of very quietly and without telling anyone. Just reverted it to Cool Ranch. It was like they killed someone and didn’t want anyone to know. And they were just like, we’re just going to quietly soak this body in lye, throw it in an incinerator.
Like no one will ever know about the time of the Cooler Ranch. Honestly, Cooler Ranch is like the least insane thing Doritos has done. Like, do you remember Doritos loaded? Do you remember the-
John: Oh yeah. Was it just double the amount of flavor?
C.A.: No, it was, it was the 7-11, like cheese Dorito triangle fried things.
John: Oh. Oh God.
C.A.: They were completely insane.
John: Oh yeah. This is bad.
C.A.: Yeah. Cause I mean, Doritos has so many examples of crazy things that I just don’t understand why Cooler Ranch is something that they’re just like, this didn’t happen. Like let us never speak of this again.
John: So, I guess this means that since you were at the post in 2015, you haven’t heard anything more about this?
C.A.: No, I absolutely have not heard anything more. And I actually went looking to see if I could find anything else. I mean, I’m sure I’ve done the same stuff you did. After you, you DMD me just to see if there was anything. I couldn’t-
I gotta be honest, cause I did kitchen up for seven months, something like that, I don’t think there was a single other instance where I couldn’t find any information about something. Cause I remember looking this up and being like, “did I ever, was this a fever dream? Did someone Photoshopped this and that’s the image that I have like that I found on Google and research?” Cause there’s just no info. And it was a unique experience. I wish I had more to give you, but I don’t know much more than you do.
Billy: I have a theory. Maybe it’s some kind of legal thing. For example, Kellogg’s frosted flakes. Kellogg’s does not own the name, frosted flakes. That’s why at any grocery store, you can find generic versions of frosted flakes that are literally called frosted flakes.
John: Right.
Billy: And I wonder if they either changed it or had to change it back because of some legal complication of not being able to secure control of one of those two names?
John: You would think though that Cooler Ranch would be the more unique-
Regina: Right.
John:It’s a legitimately confusing name, Cooler Ranch.
Adrianne: It only makes sense with the Cool Ranch before it.
John: Right.
Billy: Okay. So what is the big question we’re trying to answer here?
John: I would be satisfied if we could find the answer to three questions alright? And those questions are;
- When did Cool Ranch become Cooler Ranch?
- When did Cooler Ranchbecome Cool Ranch again?
- Was Cooler Ranch its own product? Like did it have its own flavor? Was it a distinct product from Cool Ranch that existed for some amount of time?
Regina: Was it cooler?
Billy: What are the relative levels of coolness?
Regina: Right? Yeah.
John: All right. I’m going to go to a cooler questing.
Billy: Cool.
Regina: Cooler questing?
John: I’m going to open the cooler and take out some chips.
Adrianne: Why did you put your chips in the cooler?
Regina: After the break, John gets his chips from the cooler.
Billy: Hello listeners. It’s Billy. This is the part of the show where you would normally hear an ad or maybe a promo for a podcast on the same podcast network, except we’re not part of a podcast network. And we don’t really have anything to advertise other than ourselves because we are a 100% independent production.
The four of us that you hear on the show, we make this in our spare time. And the way that we fund it is through Patreon. So you can go to patreon.com/underunderstood. And if you’re so kind as to give us $5, you’ll get access to a whole second show that we do every week, including weeks when the main show is on hiatus.
It’s a little looser than this show, a little chattier and also a little more interactive because sometimes we present stories on there that we haven’t been able to solve yet, which was the case with this story. John’s story about Doritos, we shared it on our bonus podcast Overunderstood. And people on our Patreon,there’s a whole community there and they chimed in and they helped us take this over the finish line.
So it’s also a fun way to participate in the show in addition to supporting us. So if you’d like to do that again, go to patreon.com/underunderstood or click the link in the bottom of the show notes. A big, big, thank you to everyone who has supported us so far. You are the reason this show continues to exist.
John: Hello! Welcome back everybody.
Regina: Hi John!
Adrianne: Hi!
Billy: Hi.
John: I know so much more now about doritos that I ever thought or hoped I would.
Billy: I was not aware there was a limit, but all right.
John: Maybe I don’t think there is one.
Adrianne: It’s more of a lifelong practice?
John: Right. It’s a vocation. So just to recap, what we want to know here is when Cooler Ranch debuted? When it was renamed back to Cool Ranch, right? And if this was a different product or just a rebrand of Cool Ranch?
So I started by doing the most obvious thing I could think about.
Adrianne: Ate some Doritos.
John: I ate some Doritos and then I tried to talk to Frito-Lay directly.
So I called their media hotline. I emailed them repeatedly, and no one ever returned my questions or my calls just got nothing from them.
So then I moved up and we’re onto their customer service hotline because they have this phone number that you can call to- I don’t know, I answer questions about snacks that you might have.
Announcer: Welcome to Frito lay consumer relations. This call may be monitored or recorded.
John: The very nice man that I spoke to was coincidentally named Chip.
Regina: Do you think everyone who works there is named Chip?
Adrianne: Yeah. Like, how people call everyone chef in the kitchen? It’s a sign of respect.
Regina: Yes, Chip.
John: So anyway, Chip was super nice, but he had never heard of Cooler Ranch himself. So he took down my information. He said, he’d pass it along to PR. I still haven’t heard back from PR.
So, it’s time for me to look for an inside track into the snack food underworld. So I emailed somebody named David Walsh. David Walsh is the VP of membership and communications for a group called SNAC. That’s spelled SNAC and that stands for snacking nutrition and convenience.
Adrianne: Oh, we got to keep them in our Rolodex for sure.
Regina: Oh yeah. That’ll come in handy.
John: A snack is a snack food trade group. David was super nice, but he didn’t know anything off the top of his head about Cooler Ranch so he reached out to a Frito-Lay contacting you, but he never heard back. And he ended his correspondence with “apologies, we couldn’t be of more help.”
Billy: What are they doing? Why this wall of silence?
John: I don’t know. It’s a very ubiquitous brand. A lot of people work there. I can’t get in touch with the company itself or the trade group most aligned.
Billy: And not even a peek that like they’re aware of the question and maybe discussing it internally.
John: Yeah. Yeah! All right, so this is around the time when we asked our patrons for help, and some of them came through.
There was one clue that we’ve been overlooking this whole time.
Adrianne: What’s going on.
Billy: It’s a commercial.
Commercial: Introducing Nacho Cheesier Doritos tortilla chips.
Billy: Wow.
Regina: Oh, wow.
Commercial: It was even more nacho cheese. Doritos will never be the same again.
Adrianne: Nacho Cheesier.
John: So that was the best commercial I’ve ever seen.
Billy: It’s very… I want to say-
Adrianne: Violent? It’s Elizabeth Hurley, she’s wearing a tennis outfit. She’s on the court and a Doritos shoot of the machine that shoots tennis balls. And then they hit her in the head and she falls down.
Billy: It’s basically like if the Man Show were a Doritos commercial.
Regina: Yeah.
John: Sure. This is Nacho Cheesier Doritos. Nacho Cheesier. Why didn’t this occur to us? So many people emailed us about this, and thank you to those people. Cooler Ranch was not the only rebranded amped up flavor of Dorito, They also took a Nacho Cheese Doritos and made them Nacho Cheesier Doritos.
Adrianne: I like to dimly remember this, or maybe it’s a false memory.
Billy: So, this woman was Allie Landry. She was previously in a commercial for Doritos 3D.
Adrianne: Wait that wasn’t Elizabeth Hurley?
Billy: It’s Allie Landry.
Adrianne: No.
Billy: And so this is the follow-up commercial three years later.
Adrianne: Now that I look again, it is not Elizabeth Hurley. Very, very close though.
John: Man, they Frito-Lay relies so much on prior knowledge to understand anything about them.
Adrianne: Yeah. You have to know everything about the Frito-Lay cinematic universe. Even keep up with what’s going on.
John: This was the wonder ivision of its time. This is interesting to me that, when we kind of put out the call for memories of Cooler Ranch, we got way, way, way more people saying, I remember Nacho Cheesier Doritos, but I don’t remember Cooler Ranch. And I don’t know, I feel like this is because nacho cheese is a generic term. Like, you know what nacho cheese is as a flavor, and then when it comes out as Nacho Cheesier Doritos, it’s an immediately graspable thing.
Regina: It feels like it says it, like, it sounds different. Like if you say Cool Ranch or Cooler Ranch, like they blend together and you can’t even totally tell, but nachos cheese and nachos cheese you know, when you say cheesier, you know?
John: These seem to be some kind of pair, right? There’s Nacho Cheesier Doritos and Cooler Ranch, or the amped up versions of two, existing Doritos flavors. So, knowing that Cooler Ranch and Nacho Cheesier Doritos were tied to each other, and that there’s a rebrand, it seems like it was a coordinated effort. One of our patrons, Mary was able to find an article that shed some light on this.
This is a short piece in the Fort worth star telegram on January 4th, 1995. And according to this article, “the flavor Doritos were totally overhauled across the board around this time.
Adrianne: Why?
John: For some vague reasons, referring to increased sales.
Adrianne: Why mess with a good thing?
John: There are some really intense stats in this article, it says the Doritos line accounts for 80% of all flavored tortilla chips sales, and 10% of the entire salty snack category. That adds up to 950 million bags of Doritos sold in a year. So if Doritos are so popular, why redesign? “Easy” says Frito-Lay spokesman Lynn Markley. “This is America’s favorite snack and Frito-Lay is focused on accelerated business,” Mark Lee said, Doritos brings in $1.3 billion a year, so it makes sense to increase sales in that brand.
Adrianne: What? No, it doesn’t.
John: It doesn’t. No, it doesn’t make sense to me.
Regina: What?
John: So anyway, the changes to the chips were kind of funny. They made them 20% bigger, they rounded the edges of the Doritos and made them slightly thinner. But it also says here that the same seasonings have been used with a heavier hand. So it’s possible that these tasted different.
I’m going to send you something. Could you read from the second column?
Regina: To test the new chips design, we grabbed up some bags of the old and the new chips in three flavors. Consumers aren’t going to have this opportunity. This is not a co*ke/co*ke Classic thing. The 23 Frito-Lay plants are manufacturing only the redesigned chips.
John: So this is a full cut over into the new designs.
Regina: Yeah, you’d have to save the old ones in order to do a taste test.
Our seven tasters, widely preferred the new versions of Nacho Cheesier Doritos and toasted corn, but panned the new Cooler Ranch. Comments on the Cooler Ranch ranging from way too salty to overpowering spices.
Billy: Oh, wow.
Regina: It was too cool.
Billy: It was basically freezing ranch.
John: It goes on though.
Regina: It should be pointed out that all but one of the testers has long since said goodbye to teenage years and that the 20 something testers are preferred the new Cooler Ranch. Cooler Ranch Mark Lee said is definitely a teenage flavor.
Billy: That’s so weird. What a strange way to describe 19th though.
Regina: Have long since said goodbye to teenage years.
Adrianne: It’s really circuitous.
John: This article will imply that the flavor is different.
Regina: It does.
John: I’m willing to tentatively accept that there was a change to the flavor-
Regina: Yeah.
John: In these chips and that this happened either late, 1994, going into 1995. It seems like is when the cut-over happened. So I think we do have our answer on this one.
Regina: Yeah.
John: So this leads us to wonder then when the switch back to Cool Ranch happened?
Adrianne: How did they put the genie back in the bottle?
John: How can you? To get that answer, I talked to an expert.
Jeremy: Hey, John. How are you?
John: Good. How are you? I see a pile of chips in the background.
Jeremy: There’s chips are- actually, most of my chips are out in the hallway.
Adrianne: What?
Regina: I’m sorry. What? This person just lives in a mountain of chips?
John: Kind of.
Billy: Well, they are experts.
John: This is Jeremy Selwyn.
Jeremy: I’m Chief Snacks Officer of taquitos.net. It’s a website that I started in 2000 as a way to kind of track some weird flavors of potato chips that I was oddly intrigued by and has grown from them to where I’ve reviewed over 9,000 snacks.
Adrianne: That’s so many snacks.
John: Snacks as far as Jeremy is concerned are any kind of pre-packaged ready to eat food.
Jeremy: Potato chips, tortilla chips, nuts, cheese puffs, candy bars, energy bars, pretzels, and I think it’s 150 plus kinds of Doritos.
Regina: Wow.
John: He’s been writing SAC reviews and taquitos.net for 21 years now. He’s probably going to hit 10,000 snacks this year.
Jeremy: I’m constantly finding things there’s constantly new flavors and my ability to get stuff around the world just increases as I become a better snack hunter. There’s probably 10,000 more that I haven’t even heard of.
John: So you’re not going to pack it in at 10,000?
Jeremy: I made it 10,000 by the end of the year, if I get really aggressive, like no, no plans to quit just yet.
Jeremy: This is a very weird coincidence, but Jeremy actually had some very relevant memorabilia to show me right at the beginning of our call. Normally when I’m done with a snack, I throw it out. I don’t keep the bags. They’re just, there’d be way too much if I did. I have, I’m not entirely sure what the reason was, I’ve got actual Cooler Ranch. I’ve got actually two bags of the, also one of the nachos chips here, these are unopened bags of Cooler Ranch.
John: Oh God. This is probably 15 years old plus.
Adrianne: It’s fate.
Billy: He didn’t even have to pull these out of some kind of archive? It was just there within arm’s reach?
John: Well, I mean, he knew why I was calling him, so maybe he got the red special, but he had these two open unopened bags of Cooler Ranch and horrifyingly two bags of Nacho Cheesier Doritos that had like become- they looked vacuum packed like they had shrunk around the chips inside. He was like, “I don’t know. I don’t know what happened on the inside of this bag, but it does not look good.”
Billy: Oh, wow. That’s like-
John: The summary action-
Billy: Inside temperature. They’re like vacuum sealed and the temperature, yeah.
Adrianne: Yeah. I clicked on his review for Cooler Ranch.
John: Oh yeah. Talk about that. He has a review of Cooler Ranch at taquitost.net.
Adrianne: Taste test: Cooler Ranch Doritos are a true classic. Got all the salty goodness of irregular Dorito, but without all the cheese and a unique flavor, all their own.
Smell test: pleasant, ranch chip aroma. Note that these are Cooler Ranch, not Cool Ranch as Frito-Lay changed the name several years back. Why did they abandon the better name for this one? Oh, this guy has opinions. I’ll never know. I don’t think they’re really any cooler than the original Cool Ranch. The introduction of Cool Ranch still ranks as one of the greatest milestones of the 20th century. But I guess if for some reason Frito-Lay thought they could top that by changing the name.
John: Jeremy does know exactly when Cooler Ranch’s witched back to Cool Ranch because he wrote it up on the site.
Jeremy: So what happened in 2006 was they redesigned their bags, and redesigned — it’s a major redesign. So they got this new logo and it looked like it was students from space and all shining and they renamed Cooler Ranch back to Cool Ranch and Nacho Cheesier back to nacho cheese, concurrent with that change of the logo in the back of the sign. That’s where the name went away.
John: So 2006? It was Cooler Ranch from 1994 to 2006.
Billy: Wait, hold on. I’m sorry. Everywhere it was Cooler Ranch from 1994 to 2006?
John: in the US it was.
Billy: What?
John: It’s a really long time! A really long time!
Adrianne: 12 years.
Billy: It’s a reminder when we started this story, it seemed like this almost might be some kind of Mandela effect thing. Like there was very few traces of this online. 2006 is, you know, well into the internet era. It’s-
Adrianne: My Space. Twitter.
Billy: YouTube existed.
Adrianne: Facebook.
Billy: Yeah.
John: It’s wild!
Billy: I’m just kind of stunned.
Regina: And just to clarify, Billy is…Billy is so dramatically stunned just because you’re wrong?
Was that accurate?
Billy: No! just, I would think there would be-
Regina: No! Just I wasn’t right!
Billy: No! These are a very mainstream product and we couldn’t find anything not to get too deep into conspiracy theories, but it seems like almost that Frito-Lay must have done some kind of proactive eraser of the Cooler Ranch brand.
John: No, to be fair, you can find photos of Cooler Ranch on the internet. Those are very findable.
Billy: We couldn’t find that much.
John: Do you remember the last thing we want to know for sure is what Cooler Ranch meant as a flavor of Doritos? Does the name Cooler Ranch actually mean that the chips in the bag taste distinct and different from Cool Ranch Doritos?
Adrianne: Or was it all some sort of placebo effect?
John: Right. So again, I reached out back to Frito-Lay and PepsiCo and still got no response.
I asked Jeremy because he’s been at this for so long. I asked him if he had any insider track contacts at Frito-Lay, and he said that like, occasionally they will send him products to review, but he doesn’t actually know anyone well enough to make an intro. And I guess this shouldn’t really be surprising because this is exactly what C.A. Pinkham said was his experience at Jezebel.
C.A.: I’m telling you if you’re just like, “Hey, I have questions about a former product.” They’re like,” Oh yeah, absolutely.” And as soon as you’re like,” it’s Cooler Ranch,” it’s just radio silence.
John: At this point, I called up a friend of ours, Liz Plank. Liz is an author, journalist, host, but she’s also the only other person I know who’s ever had direct contact with the Doritos brand.
What is your relationship to your Doritos?
Liz: Very intimate. Very one-sided as well. A few years ago, I went to Miami on my own for Christmas, and I did this photo shoot and the day before the shoot, I was like, I should do this as an engagement photo. Who can I get engaged to? Doritos!
So I decided to buy bagDorito and do an engagement photo op to this poor photographer, like he was like, “I’m sorry, what?” So we had a lot of fun. And so when I posted that, I guess some people started writing about it and Doritos caught wind of my photo shoot.
And so they then got in touch with me and I’d say, “Hey, Liz, we loved your Doritos post.” Honestly, one of the funniest posts we’ve seen. Would you mind if we posted some of your pictures, we will tag you?” And I was like, of course and I said, I love you so much. And then the Doritos account responded, the love is mutual smiley face” then sends the kiss.
“All right. We’re live on her story, check it out and thanks again for letting us repost it.” And then, and then that was it.
John: You don’t have like some direct line to the company still?
Liz: I do not. I’ve been desperate for a Doritos brand deal. Like it just doesn’t even make sense that, I mean, it’s just a big mystery to me.
John: Man. I’ve emailed them so many times. Nothing.
Liz: Why do you think that they are so afraid of you and so afraid of revealing the truth?
John: I mean, I don’t think they’re really afraid of me. I think they just have nothing to gain by talking to me.
But just as I was running out of hope, I heard back from someone named Steve Liguori.
Steve: Good morning, John.
John: How are you?
Steve: I’m good. We finally are connecting here.
John: Steve was VP of marketing at Frito-Lay from around 1991 through 1994 and was with the company until 1996. So he was there for the Cooler Ranch switchover.
Adrianne: Perfect timing.
John: Yeah.
Steve: There was a refresh ‘94 or five and six on Cooler Ranch at the time. And that, that was a direct descendant of what we did in ‘92, around natural cheesier Doritos.
John: When Steve started at Frito-Lay, the Doritos brand was strong, but was starting to stagnate a little bit.
Adrianne: Uh huh.
John: So they started throwing around ideas to kind of freshen up the brand, bring in a new surge of sales.
So their first step at that was a product called bite-sized Doritos. These were just smaller Doritos and they came in like two sleeves in a bigger bag.
Steve: And because they were so small and heavy, they just broke. So people were buying these bags and half of the bad was crumbs. So the complaints went up, the sales went down, you know it was a great idea, gone bad.
John: So bite-sized Doritos, a big flop. So it was back to the drawing board.
Steve: So then we got the idea of Nacho Cheesier Doritos. So if you look in your archives and I imagine you could still find this, there was a term particularly among teenagers referred to as Dorito’s breath.
John: Yeah.
Steve: Dorito’s breath was because of the combination of garlic and onion, which is pretty high in the spice mix and so after you ate a few Doritos, you got Dorito’s breath. So we decided to make Nacho Cheesier Doritos. We’re going to crank up some of the nacho flavoring, but we’re going to dial down the garlic.
Billy: Oh!
Adrianne: That seems like a good, good idea.
Billy: But that’s something we had not considered it or heard from anyone else at this point that the flavor change was to prevent a problem.
John: I think this is like a chicken egg thing. I think it was kind of a happy accident that the problem went away when they started messing with making the chips cheesier cause they had to- it seems like it’s a zero sum game in some way where like you amp up the, the cheese you need to back off something else.
Regina: Yeah.
John: So what this means is that Nacho Cheesier was a distinctly new flavor of Doritos, was different from the older Nacho Cheese.
Steve: We work with the R and D department. The sophistication in making some of these products is crazy. So it’s like the secret formula in co*ke that nobody knows. Well, this is like the secret formula and in nacho cheese, Doritos. Yeah. What’s the garlic, what’s a tomato? What’s the onion? A little bit of oregano, a little bit of this. I mean it, and yes, we tweaked it to make it cheesier. It was definitely noticeable. Definitely.
John: He told me that it tested great in focus groups with existing Doritos fans, which were mostly kids.
Steve: The sweet spot for Doritos, the bulls-eye was teenage boys. I mean, it was like, bam! They’re kind of like, kind of like Mountain Dew, which PepsiCo also owns. It’s like, you know, bam, this is for you. If you want, you know, full on intense flavor crunchy, this snack is for you.
Billy: Bam! Hop on a skateboard, grab some Doritos and some Dew.
Regina: Does PepsiCo also own Axe?
Billy: Oh yeah. Oh, I wonder. Yeah, if you, I wonder what the combination of Dorito’s breath and Axe body spray smells like.
Regina: Yeah, exactly like that combo. It’s the teen teen boy power combo.
Billy: Yeah.
John: So Nacho Cheesier Doritos were this huge hit. Thanks to the improved taste, the lack of Dorito’s breath. And a commercial featuring George Foreman and his four sons who are also all named George.
Announcer: Conclusive proof four out of five. George foreman’s prefer the taste of new Doritos tortilla chips with more natural juice flavor.
John: So it’s a huge hit. It’s 1992. Steve is riding high and the next year, 1993, he launches Wavy Lays.
Billy: Oh wow.
John: With the first modern Superbowl halftime show, starring Michael Jackson.
Announcer: Superbowl halftime show brought to you by wavy Frito-Lay.
John: Basically Frito-Lay is growing. It’s all about introducing new and improved products to their line.
Steve: It’s new and improved. It’s a whole new flavor. What can you do to keep it fresh and top of mind? I wouldn’t say there was anything wrong with Cooler Ranch Doritos. It was, “Hey, if we relaunched Nacho Cheesier Doritos to huge success, it was just a logical extension of the teams that follow me to say, let’s do a Cooler Ranch.”
John: To clarify a little bit here by 1994 or 95, when Cooler Ranch happened, Steve wasn’t directly involved in the campaign itself, but this new and improved thing is definitely where Cooler Ranch came from.
Regina: Got it. So this was just like a successful play in the book.
John: Right. Yeah.
Billy: Purely marketing.
John: Okay. Well, did those tastes different from Cool Ranch or was that more of a marketing thing?
Steve: I’d say that at least in my recollection was maybe like 50, 50. The answer is they absolutely- yes, did taste cooler. I can’t tell you exactly what the spices were in that one, but there’s kind of like an onion and sour cream kind of base in there, and they put yesterday did more of that. Yeah, no- look, no organization, certainly of the stature of fruit only our PepsiCo is going to introduce something and it’s smoke and mirrors. I mean, they just ethically and morally. They wouldn’t go there-
John: They wouldn’t go there illegally too, yeah.
Steve: And right. And it probably legally, so no, it was absolutely a new and improved formula it had been consumed, definitely tested with consumers. No different than I did with all the natural cheesier stuff that we did.
John:There it is. There’s our answers.
Regina: Yeah.
John: Cool Ranch Doritos became Cooler Ranch in late 1994, early 95. This really was a new cooler flavor. It was a different flavor of some sort. And then it stuck around for nearly 12 years until a major rebrand in 2006, restored the name of the product back to Cool Ranch.
Billy: I’m just still kind of – I’m shocked. I don’t know. I mean, I would have been what? Like five or six when they made this change? So most of my life that I can remember up until 2006 was Cooler Ranch, and then they changed it and I’ve been believing that it was Cool Ranch all along. Yeah.
Regina: Again, it seems like a segment just about Billy being shocked that he was wrong.
John: Well, I think it’s more like he’s shocked that he was hoodwinked into believing something or into a false memory. Like it really worked.
Billy: And yeah, there’s no trace of it and they won’t talk about it.
John: So, with all this new information in hand, I got back in touch with C.A. who wrote this up and kitchenette to tell him what I had found. What’s your guests for how long it was Cooler Ranch?
C.A.: Yeah, God, uh, maybe a year.
John: It was 12 years.
C.A.: I’m sorry, what?
John:It switched back from Cooler Ranch back to Cool Ranch in 2006.
C.A.: Until to- Jesus! Well it’s how did we not- ? Okay. I have so many questions. I mean, it still amazes me that nobody’s gotten back to you that no one has just said, “Oh yeah, we did this for 12 years. And then we didn’t,” like you’d figure one email.
John: Yeah. Yeah.
C.A.: Very weird. Hold on, was it 12 years that they called it Cooler Ranch? Or 12 years with the formula was changed?
John: Without talking to Frito-Lay, I can’t be sure that anything changed about the formula in 2006.
C.A.: We could be living in the era of Cooler Ranch still, and nobody knows.
John: That’s a good point.
C.A.: Yeah. Yeah. We could absolutely- like it maybe it’s just, we’ve been Cooler Ranch for 25 years and just no one ever knew.
John: And this question is kind of complicated. Billy found some pertinent information about this. It turns out that today’s Cool Ranch was actually reinvented in 2020. And they explicitly said in the press release that they made Cool Ranch cooler, but kept the name, Cool Ranch.
Billy: So it’s possible if they made Cool Ranch cooler, when it became Cooler Ranch and didn’t dial down the coolness when they changed it back to Cool Ranch-
Regina: Double cool.
Billy: It is now double cool.
John: Yeah.
Regina: Coolest too cool too furious.
Billy: That it’s only been getting cooler over time.
John: So in the absence of an official statement, I think I have to do my own science.
Regina: Oh, no.
Billy: Your own science.
John: This is one of Jeremy’s unopened bags of cooler Ranch from at least 15 years ago.
Regina: Oh God, you’re kidding.
Billy: God! No!
John: And this is a modern bag of Cool Ranch Doritos.
Billy: Wow.
Regina: You have a 15 year old bag of chips.
John: I do. It’s right here. It looks pretty normal.
Regina: Wait, when does it say it expires?
John: So I have a, well, this is the thing, the expiration dates on Doritos, don’t have a year attached to them. So it’s January 17th of some year. And the copyright on this bag is I believe 2001.
This could be 20 years old. He thinks it’s 15 years old, but I can feel that there are chips still- they still feel like chips like intact chips in hand.
Billy: I hope so! So you’re going to eat these?
John: Yeah, I think that’s the only thing I can do. Well, at least be able to compare them and see if today’s Cool Ranch is different from 15 year old Cooler.
Adrianne: You just opened it. Show us.
John: Yeah. So you just opened it. I just opened it. I’ve opened the bag. They don’t smell like chips.
Adrianne: Oh no. Bad sign.
John: These smell like crayons. It’s got a crayonny scent.
Regina: Is the smell of the regular bag good.
John: You want me to open up the regular one?
Regina: Is the smell people like about Doritos?
John: Oh, the smell is incredibly different.
Regina: Oh, God.
Adrianne: Okay.
John: It looks like a regular chip.
Regina: Can you do it side by side?
John: The new one is much darker.
Regina: Yeah.
John: I’ll start with the new one. Cool Ranch. That’s a Cool Ranch.
Now, compared to this.
Regina: How is the taste?
John: It’s really bad. It’s horrible!
Billy: What year is it from?
John: It’s like bitter.
Regina: Yeah. I wonder what things like-
John: It’s much worse than I thought it was going to be. It’s really crispy. It tastes like mothballs.
Regina: It’s really crispy. That’s interesting. Oh, you spit it out.
John: It’s bitter. It tastes like crayons smell. I haven’t eaten crayon in a long time. You ever smell something dusty?
Billy: Yeah?
John: It tastes like that, for like, old electronics, how they smell. I would definitely describe the flavor as old. It’s not cooler that’s for sure. I got to say, I thought it was going to hold up better than that.
Adrianne: Yeah, me too.
John: We’ve learned absolutely nothing. This was such a bad idea.
Adrianne: Thanks for listening. Underunderstood is Regina Dellea, Billy Disney, John Lagomarsino and me Adriane Jeffries.
John: Specialty thanks this week to our Patreon supporters who were a huge, huge help in reporting out this episode and are also generally extremely cool. If you’re not already a patreon and you’d like to become one and get access to our weekly bonus podcast, head over to patreon.com/underunderstood.
Billy: We are an independent show. We’re not part of some bigger network and that means the main way people find out about us is via word of mouth. So if you could leave a review for us on Apple podcasts, or just tell a friend about us, that really means a lot.
Regina: And if you have a burning question, the internet can’t answer, we want to know about it. Email us at hello@Underunderstood.com.
Billy: Thanks for listening.
