The Doritos brand is owned by Frito-Lay, the snack maker also behind Sun Chips, Fritos, Lay’s, Cheetos, Tostitos, FunYuns … I’ll stop there to save time.
Cool Ranch is, perhaps, the most popular flavor of Doritos. It stands to reason that Cool Ranch is the baseline for what we can expect from other Doritos products.
Ingredients in Cool Ranch Doritos
Whole corn, vegetable oil, corn maltodextrin, salt, tomato powder, corn starch, lactose, whey, nonfat milk, corn syrup solids, onion powder, sugar, garlic powder, monosodium glutamate, cheddar cheese, dextrose, malic acid, buttermilk, natural and artificial flavors, sodium acetate, Red #40, Blue #1, Yellow #5, sodium caseinate, spice, citric acid, disodium inosinate, disodium guanylate.
(Ingredients listed by Frito-Lay website in 2011)
Though the list looks intimidatingly long, it is similar to other flavored snack chips. One major difference I notice is the use of artificial flavors and artificial coloring.
Artificial coloring in a corn-chip? where? Let’s zoom in on the earlier photo.
Those specks of red must be the synthetic Red #40. It’s hard to know what Blue #1 and Yellow #5 are doing, but my guess is that they play similar roles in adding minor aesthetic enhancement to the chip.