Doritos started as an accident at Disneyland's Casa de Fritos restaurant, where a delivery driver suggested frying stale tortillas that were meant to be thrown away. Within a year, the fried chips became the restaurant's best seller, catching the attention of a Disney executive who pitched it to Frito-Lay, which branded them Doritos and turned them into a multi-billion-dollar empire.
Doritos is a multi-billion dollar empire that literally started as garbage. Here's what happened. So it all starts with this guy. No, no, this guy over here, Walt Disney. When Walt created Disney World, he didn't have enough money to build the entire park. He invited other companies to open restaurants inside of Disneyland. Fritos is one of those and opens a Tex-Mex restaurant called Casa de Fritos. People absolutely love it. And one day they're getting a tortilla delivery and the delivery guy looks in the trash and he sees hundreds of tortillas that had been old, stale, and thrown away. And he says, hey, why don't you fry those and sell them instead of throwing them away? So the restaurant owner The restaurant adds it to the menu without even telling the headquarters mucky mucks at Frito Company. And after a year, the chip is their best-selling item. And eventually a marketing exec at Disney notices them and pitches the idea to Frito-Lay. He calls them Doritos because it rhymes with their existing products Fritos and Cheetos. And today they're the top-ranked tortilla chip in the United States.
