Doritos Were Created at Disneyland
Specifically at Frontierland’s Casa de Fritos restaurant, owned and operated by the Frito and later the Frito-Lay Company.
In its early years, Disneyland’s food concessions were a patchwork of outside partnerships, and most followed a similar aesthetic: loose regional theming paired with product placement, the most notable examples being Aunt Jemima’s Pancake House, also of Frontierland, the Chicken of the Sea Pirate Ship Restaurant in Fantasyland, and Tahitian Terrace, operated by Stouffer’s, in Adventureland. Casa de Fritos had the same general purpose: marketing and showcasing their product line within a physical restaurant - staffed by costumed waiters and waitresses - that, in their case, primarily served tacos, enchiladas, and tamales.
Outside its doors stood a vending machine display animated by a life-sized brand mascot called the Frito Kid, who, if you dropped a nickel into the coin slot, would light up and order an unseen prospector named Klondike to send a bag of Fritos down a metal chute from inside a plaster mountain.
Beginning sometime in the early 1960s, whenever a shipment of tortillas, sourced from the local supplier Alex Foods, would arrive at the restaurant stale or just eventually go bad from neglect, the kitchen staff, rather than just toss them out, would instead cut them up and fry them, creating a crispy chip they’d serve as both a snack and a side dish. They were unsalted and totally unflavored, but they were unique as far as chips went, and so quickly became exceptionally popular with guests.
Even still, it would be years before they officially became a part of the Frito-Lay product line. That ended up being the work of marketing executive Arch West, who’d previously worked on national ad campaigns for Jell-O - at the time owned by General Foods - and later, Lay’s. He originally discovered the chips on a family trip to the park in 1964, and was so impressed by them and their potential that, when he returned to Frito-Lay’s Dallas HQ a week later, pushed for them to be incorporated into the company’s growing snack portfolio, which then also included Cheetos (1948) and Ruffles (1948).
The new chip was branded Doritos - a nonsense word loosely contracted from the Spanish for ‘little fried golden thing’ (doradito) - by West himself, so the story goes, and released nationally in 1966. Originally they were, like the Casa de Fritos prototypes, totally flavorless and unsalted, but that would change just a couple years later, when the company rolled out the Taco flavor, whose blend of spices was meant to give them the taste of seasoned beef.
Frito-Lay would develop and introduce around 100 other flavor variants over the next 60+ years, none more iconic and enduring than Nacho Cheese, released 5 years after Taco, and of course Cool Ranch, which first hit the market in 1986.
The original Casa de Fritos restaurant would eventually close in 1982 when Disney ended its partnership with Frito-Lay, but a new restaurant called Casa Mexicana would take its place later that year. Like Casa de Fritos, it was one of the park’s most popular restaurants until 2001, when it was absorbed by a new restaurant that had recently opened next door, Rancho del Zocalo Restaurante. Then as now, it’s sponsored by Ortega.
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