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.
But Ivan did not, to my disappointment, get abducted. We left the supermarket, got to the car and I ripped open the bag. I waited a second. Watched. Ivan still not abducted. Dammit. We each ate a chip in silence, me with my phone out, ready to text a new name for the chip to headquarters. What did it taste like?
“Anchovy. No—tartar sauce,” I said, chewing.
“Pickle?”
“Yes, there’s pickle in tartar sauce! Yes!”
“It tastes like a gas grill.”
“Tastes like a beefy pickle.” We popped more chips, searching for the words to describe the chemical intensity being wreaked upon our taste buds; we were like really trashy wine snobs: “Ah, an arrière-goût of American cheese? A petit soupçon of Wonderbread?”
With some fine-tuning, we concluded that X-13D tastes like cheeseburger. Seriously. It’s a chip that tastes like cheeseburger.
The challenge, as issued by headquarters, was to “let your mouth decide what they should be named.” My mouth thought long and hard about it, and in the end, this is really the story of how I, a mostly rational adult, ended up text-messaging the phrase “Radioactive Cheeseburger” to the phone number C-H-I-P-S.
What do I stand to win, you ask? 100 “unbelievably lucky” random winners will be selected to become Doritos “Flavor Masters.” This means they win Doritos for a year and the “privilege of tasting new secret creations.” It strikes me that this might be a whole new marketing tack—to celebrate how awesomely, completely, futuristically artificial a product is. Doritos has created a fictional universe that ultimately revolves around how truly unabashedly lab-produced their “secret creations” are. Not that anybody ever thought that there was some bonneted maiden churning up a vat of Cool Ranch sauce and rolling out stone-ground corn into little triangles. But to turn the flavor-factory artifice into a game—well, they got me and Ivan to buy a bag. Ivan? Oh my God—Ivan? He was just standing next to me a second ago! NOOOOOO!!!