What Have We Been Eating All Along Then?
There is something almost comically revealing about a food company taking one of America’s most recognizable junk foods, stripping out artificial dyes and artificial flavors, and then proudly announcing that it is now “naked.” Apparently, after decades of eating fluorescent orange Doritos and Cheetos, we have finally reached the point where the manufacturer wants to tell us that the ingredients responsible for that iconic look and taste are no longer necessary. Wait….what?!?!?!
PepsiCo has introduced DORITOS SIMPLY NKD and CHEETOS SIMPLY NKD, versions of the snacks made without artificial colors and artificial flavors. The Doritos varieties include Nacho Cheese and Cool Ranch, and the company describes them as delivering the familiar flavor without the added color.
And then there is the most bizarre part: the chips are essentially colorless.
Take away the artificial coloring and suddenly your Dorito doesn’t look like the radioactive-orange triangle we’ve known for generations. It looks like… a corn chip. Imagine that. Humanity has apparently discovered that corn doesn’t naturally grow in the color of a traffic cone. It was getting the Donald Trump Orange Spray Job!
But this raises a bigger question: if PepsiCo can make Doritos and Cheetos without artificial dyes and still sell them as essentially the same snack, why were those artificial ingredients there in the first place? Well, to kill us with cancer….duuuhhhhh!
Consumers Should Be Asking Questions
So why the about face? What was the decision based on?
PepsiCo is essentially telling consumers: Here is the snack you already love, except we removed artificial colors and flavors. The company’s own Doritos website describes SIMPLY NKD Nacho Cheese as the classic flavor “now naked of dyes and artificial flavors.” PepsiCo similarly promoted the new products as delivering the same crunch and flavor without added color.
So if the color isn’t necessary, why was it added for all those years?
The obvious answer is that food manufacturers have historically used color because people eat with their eyes. Bright orange cheese snacks look cheesier. A vividly colored chip can appear more flavorful and exciting than a pale one. The food industry understands this better than anyone.
Why Should Consumers Have to Buy a Special Version to Avoid Ingredients They Increasingly Don’t Want in Their Food?
If artificial dyes are becoming unpopular enough that one of America’s largest food companies is creating an entire product line without them, perhaps the question isn’t whether the new “naked” Doritos are healthier. Perhaps the question is why the standard version needs the artificial ingredients at all. And why would you even keep the unhealthier version on the shelves? The change is admitting fault in the original product.
And this isn’t happening in a vacuum. PepsiCo’s launch comes amid increasing political and consumer pressure surrounding synthetic food dyes. The company is responding to a marketplace that is becoming much more suspicious of highly processed foods and artificial ingredients. The result is predictable: give the people the junk food they love, but make it sound slightly less terrifying on the ingredient label.
That is where I think consumers should remain skeptical.
Calling something “Simply NKD” doesn’t magically transform Doritos into health food. It is still a processed snack. It is still something most people should probably eat in moderation rather than pretending a bag constitutes a balanced meal. Removing artificial colors doesn’t suddenly make a cheese-flavored tortilla chip broccoli.
But the existence of the product does demonstrate something important: PepsiCo can make the familiar Doritos experience without artificial colors and flavors.
That fact alone should make people look a little harder at the original recipe. If you can remove something from a product and consumers still get the same basic experience, you have to wonder what purpose that ingredient was serving in the first place.
And this is where the “naked” Doritos story gets interesting. The company isn’t saying, “We’ve discovered our old recipe was dangerous.” Nobody has established that. What PepsiCo is saying is that consumers can now have the classic experience without certain artificial ingredients. Those are two very different claims.
Still, I can’t help looking at a bag of the new colorless Doritos and thinking about the old fluorescent-orange ones. For decades, we were apparently perfectly happy eating chips that looked like they had been dipped in a can of industrial paint. Now the manufacturer wants us to believe the future is better when the chip doesn’t need to be orange at all.
Maybe that is simply marketing. Maybe it is responding to changing consumer preferences. Or maybe it is another example of something we’ve seen repeatedly in the food industry: once consumers start asking what is actually in their food, companies suddenly discover they can make it without quite so much artificial stuff.
While we can’t prove that Doritos are “killing us”, it is fair to ask the question PepsiCo’s own product launch naturally creates. If the artificial dyes and flavors aren’t necessary, why were we eating them in the first place? Sometimes the most interesting thing about a new product isn’t what’s been added. It’s what’s been taken out.
