“Why can’t I have you? But I need you so.”
~American Taste Buds
Doritos are one of the better snack gifts we’ve given to the world. Since 1964, when we first decided that we could probably get rid of our leftover tortillas by cutting them into triangles, frying them, and smothering them with fake cheese, Doritos has been there for every Super Bowl party and for every 2:30 AM stoned 7-Eleven run. Even when Japan tried ruining Doritos, which came as a surprise to no one, they forever stood out as delicious, cheesy (or cool-ranchy) ways to get saturated fats into our bodies and flavor powder permanently tattooed onto our fingertips.
Japanese meddling notwithstanding, Doritos has never been content to stand by with just a handful of flavors. In fact, they’ve released nearly a hundred different flavors throughout the years. And despite the existence of “ketchup” or “sonic sour cream” flavors on that lengthy list of Doritos flavors that have been released and then rightfully vanquished to that warehouse where they put the Ark of the Covenant, some of these flavors actually sound delicious. But they’re gone. No matter how much we want to try them, we never can.
Here are some delicious Doritos flavors that the Frito-Lay company foolishly decided were mistakes.
Discontinued Doritos Flavors Too Beautiful For This World
Before you worry, no, the Doritos Locos Tacos flavored Doritos are not on this list. That’s some meta bullshit Frito-Lays released to capitalize on the craze born from Taco Bell’s “as disgusting as this is it’s actually kind of great” awkward conversation thrust upon the world known as the Taco Bell Doritos Locos. This is a stupid flavor, and they knew it was stupid when they released it, but they wanted to see how many of us were stupid and wanted to buy this stupid thing. Stupid stupid stupid.
These next Doritos flavors, however, were not stupid. They were smart. Smart and sexy. Smart and sexy and we want them and are sad that we can’t. Bring them back, Doritos! That website with the grizzly bear in the logo demands it of you!
3D’s Jalapeño & Cheddar
Welcome to the most Buzzfeed-baiting entry in this article. The Doritos 3D’s line of snacks, which can best be described as “Doritos-meets-Bugles,” was so 90’s we don’t even have to make a joke about it, we can just link you to the youtube video of the actual Doritos 3D commercial where Ali Landry does flips in a Laundromat while Sean Hayes from Will and Grace watches, dumbfounded. Seriously, the only way that Doritos 3D’s could be any more 90’s is if each bag came with a set of pogs, with slammers that alternated between playing “Who Let the Dogs Out” and shouting “Whassaaaaaaaaap.”
But damn were they tasty. The logic is sound as hell—Doritos are delicious. Bugles are delicious. If you give these to a kid, he will fast realize that he can gnaw out the bottom of the triangle and jam a few fingers in there and play with it like a fucking finger puppet because that’s what we did when we were 10 years old and “tablets” or “faster-than-dial-up internet speeds” weren’t a thing yet. Doritos had a serious of flavors, including their standard Nacho and Ranch flavors, but Jalapeño Cheddar was a new combination with just enough of a kick to compensate for the fact that the flavor on this particular type of chip ended up being a little milder on these chips, compared to their 2-D brethren.
But at the end of the day, we miss Doritos 3D’s. Sure, many of us don’t even give the admittedly gimmicky product a second thought, but we can guarantee that if they came back on the market tomorrow, everyone between the age of 23 and 33 would be freaking the fuck out trying to get themselves a bag of this delicious air-pocket-filled treat. Damn it, we miss you, Doritos 3D’s. Come back.
Taco Supreme
Yes, before we had tacos made out of Doritos, or Doritos made to taste like tacos made out of Doritos, we had Doritos that tasted like tacos. And you know what? They were surprisingly good. Way better than a flavor of Doritos specifically made to shill both Taco Bell as well as the re-release of the original Star Wars trilogy had any right to be. Good enough to have a petition demanding that Doritos bring back the flavor. Okay, fine, yes, it’s only got three signatures, but still! A petition, people!
Doritos Taco Supreme worked despite itself for pretty much the same reason why the Doritos Locos Tacos work—if you like the general flavor of tacos, adding a cheesy tortilla flavor to that can only be a good thing. And if you don’t like the general flavor of tacos, we’ve done it, we’ve finally found you, Lentar 1039, the last of the Soviet Kill-Bots, now do as we demand and reach to the back of your head to press your self-destruct button.
Megawhat Chili Cheese
We honestly weren’t able to find a lot about Doritos’ short-lived “Megawhat?” campaign, but what we did find was, well, basically our writers getting drunk and making fun of the stupid fucking name. It appears they released several new flavors of Doritos, and decided to make a gimmicky contest where you, the eater, can come up with a name of the new flavor. There are only two ways that can go, if you think about it—either it very clearly tastes like the thing it’s supposed to taste like, so you’re just going to name it what it tastes like (“huh, this chili-cheese flavored Doritos tastes a lot like a Doritos, with chili-cheese flavor to it. Wait! We can call it Chili Cheese Doritos! Eureka! Eur-fucking-eka!”), or no one has a fucking clue what the flavor is, so everyone has to write in and be like, “I think it tastes like…despondency? Yes, I think it tastes like despondency.”
We’re going to err on the side of trusting Doritos here, and assume that this particular flavor actually did taste like a chili cheese flavored chip, and not some sort of terrifying flavor that, try as you might, you can’t identify, which just terrifies you and claws at your insides until it slowly drives you insane. Granted, that might be a lot of faith to put into a company that tried to make a ham and cheese flavored chip (that unfortunately is not a joke) but they’re also owned by the company that made chili cheese flavored Fritos, and those are fucking delicious. We’d absolutely eat a Dorito doused in the same flavor-powder-chemical-magic that’s on those. Man, now we really want a bag of chili cheese Fritos.
Fiery Habañero
This objectively is a delicious tortilla chip. As in, when we say “there’s a Facebook group demanding that this flavor be brought back” we’re not actually using some flimsy result from a Google search to try to artificially inflate our argument, we’re saying that there’s an actual group with almost 1,900 members clamoring to bring back some Habañero Doritos. Fiery Habañero Doritos’ lack of success was not because of the flavor (because habañero peppers are delicious) or a clash of flavors (who wouldn’t want to eat spicy Doritos, other than people who eat boring food and people with ulcers?). It was simply that this beautiful, wonderful chip was ahead of its time.
We’ve mentioned previously that spicy food has become exponentially more popular in our collective culinary enterprises, but back in 2005, when these chips came out, we were only just starting to embrace spicy Cheetos as the magical, finger-staining gift that it was. We weren’t talking about habañeros, or scotch bonnet peppers, or ghost chilies. We were living food lives, tittering that, “Golly, you’re flavoring it like a jalapeño pepper? Goodness to Betsy, how can my taste buds survive?” But we’re past those dark days, America. We love our spicy food like we like our women—making us cry, don’t you see Sharon, I love you, I’m sorry I can be open with my feelings now just please taek meapaepghiap agpeh aehipgstop it iapghoepaghpeag you don’t’ dpagheapgadon’t deny my love apgheipaoghap ghepaigaep oh god OH NO DON’T TAKE ME AWAyhwsph
Woah, sorry there, that was, well, the page loaded strangely. We didn’t just drag one of our writers kicking and weeping out of the room and assign the rest of this piece to a different writer, telling him to make a joke about the whole thing so that people will think that the joke site just made another funny. Funny funny jokes. Yay funny fun times.
Anyway, the point being, a Habañero Doritos is a magical thing, and we need it back in our lives. Until then, we’ll have to be content with the Doritos Habañero flavored “Dinamita”, which is a Doritos rolled up into a tube (so, basically, their attempt to make a knock-off version of Takis).
Guacamole
This flavor just makes common sense, and the fact that this was on the market and didn’t immediately change the Doritos choosing conversation from “cheddar or cool ranch” to “cheddar, cool ranch, or guacamole, oh, who am I kidding, let’s get all three, fat people die happier” means that we failed the Frito-Lay corporation as a society at some point in time. These were discontinued around 2006, meaning that we really shat the bed as far as Doritos flavors in two consecutive years, if you go back to the Habañero fiasco of 2005.
Why would sales for Guacamole Doritos be lax enough to warrant discontinuing the flavor? We, as a species, as a collective writhing mess of shared experiences and customs, love guacamole. It’s delicious, and everyone who doesn’t pay an extra two dollars to get a teaspoon worth of guacamole on their massive Chipotle burrito is rightly condemned as “doing it wrong” by every other customer in the establishment. And Doritos, in their very heart and soul, are little more than a flavored tortilla chip. So why deal with the middle man? Even if it only tastes slightly like avocado and salt, that’s better than 90% of chips out on the market! We’d just rather eat a Guacamole Doritos than another fucking bag of vinegar and pucker face or whatever the fuck they flavor those fancy bags of chips you see in delis with. And yes, this one has a Facebook group demanding it be brought back as well. Because ya done goofed, America. Ya done goofed.
Salsa! And Salsa Verde!
This is the same concept as the previous entry, but with a flavor that is even safer to assume that people will eat. There are some people that don’t like guacamole, and occasionally they manage to even make it to adulthood without being banished from their town and forced to forage in the woods, befriending wolves who ultimately will betray them as soon as food grows scarce in the winter. But salsa is the most popular condiment in America! Well, apparently mayonnaise is, but if you had read that last sentence and seen a link embedded there, you would have taken us for our word on it. You probably wouldn’t have clicked it, but still would have taken it for face value and believed in your heart of hearts that we were telling you the truth. Actually, fuck it, we can actually find a few sites that say that salsa is the top dog amongst condiments in the US, here’s a link and everything, we are Gods we create our own truths.
Basically, everyone likes salsa, or at least tolerates it enough to have no qualms eating it in Doritos form. So the fact that Doritos released a Salsa and Salsa Verde flavor, and then decided to pull it off the shelves, is inconceivable to us. Did they not know how to market it, or did they only make it available in stores whose clientele aren’t allowed to chew their own food, so they have to mash it up in a blender with some water so they could drink it like a Doritos smoothy, because eww, a Salsa Doritos smoothie sounds disgusting, but Salsa Doritos sound amazing, and why are you leaving these important decisions up to such a tiny and specific portion of the population? You monsters, give us our Salsa chips back!
Give us all of these back! We demand more Doritos!
