What is friendlier, less threatening, more full of primary colors and cartoon script, than the junk food aisle at the supermarket? I usually don’t keep junk food around, so that when I get hit by the urge to devour something cookie-monster-style, I’m stuck with edamame and fennel and I can’t do too much damage. But this week, responsible for the snacks at a large backyard barbecue, I plowed my shopping cart down the junk food aisle and felt myself among old friends. Ah, Bugles—good to see you’re still sponsoring NASCAR, you classy corn cones. And of course, Funyons—still illiterate, after all these years. Oh, Tostidos, you ambassadors of fun from fake-Mexico—get off your rented donkey and join the party! And Cheetos, you filthy, fluorescent confetti, just get in my cart, we’ll pick up some hand sanitizer on the way out. It was good to be back. But as I was reaching for a family-size bag of Cool Ranch Doritos I noticed something a few rows down: a completely black bag of Doritos with only these words on the front: X-13D. That’s it. X-13D, like an experimental drug or a radioactive element. Curiosity got the better of me and I grabbed a bag. A smaller label read, “This is the X-13D Flavor Experiment. Objective: Taste and name Doritos Flavor X-13D.” You could send a text message to a special number (24477, or C-H-I-P-S) for “additional instructions.”
First of all, an all-black bag in the giddy idiot polychrome context of the snack food aisle is just alarming. It’s like finding a mugger’s mask—on fire—in the Barbie aisle at the toy store. Second of all, if Doritos’ marketing mission here is to tap into my sense of adventure, they’ve succeeded. I fully expected, the minute I picked up the bag and texted headquarters for further instructions—which, yes, I immediately did—that a renegade SWAT team would swoop in, kicking through the windows, and abduct my shopping partner, a demure and thoughtful graduate student named Ivan price-comparing yogurts three aisles away from me. I would have to keep texting Doritos for clues, and eventually track him down to their evil flavor lab. “I wish I’d never HEARD of the X-13D flavor experiment,” I would say grimly at the end of the adventure, covered in scrapes, bruises and Nacho Cheesier powder.
My wild action-adventure fantasy isn’t far off from what the Doritos marketing is trying to evoke. Doritos.com takes you to an entire fantasy city with a building literally marked “headquarters.” Click on the X-13D banner and the Doritos city melts away as you visually sweep into a futuristic steel laboratory full of gadgets, at the center of which the black X-13D Doritos bag rotates like a freshly-minted Frankensnack. To get flavor clues, you have to play what amount to kiddie computer games, but in a laboratory setting and with hilariously serious text: “Play with the knobs and buttons to guide the cheese through the entire machine. Achieve that, and you’ll get a clue.” Thank you, sensei, I will try to achieve that.
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