Cheetoh - History

History

Cheetos were invented in the 1940s by Fritos creator Charles Elmer Doolin, who cooked early test batches in the Frito Company's Dallas, Texas-based research and development kitchen. The cheese-flavored snack sold quickly, but Doolin did not have the production or distribution capacity to support a nationwide launch. This led Doolin to partner with potato chip businessman Herman W. Lay for marketing and distribution, and Cheetos were introduced nationally in the U.S. in 1948 along with a potato product called Fritatos. The success of Cheetos prompted Doolin and Lay to merge their two companies in 1961, forming Frito-Lay Inc. At the time, Cheetos was one of four large snack food brands produced by the company, which had annual revenues of $127 million. Frito-Lay merged with the Pepsi-Cola Company to form PepsiCo in 1965, prompting further distribution of Cheetos outside of North America.

While Cheetos was the first snack food of its kind, competing products in the snack food category have since emerged--including Utz Cheese Curls, Herr's Cheese Curls and Wise Cheez Doodles. Most of the competing cheese-flavored snacks are distributed in specific regions of the U.S., and as of 2010 Cheetos remains as the top-selling cheese puff in America.

As of 2011, Cheetos are produced, marketed and distributed under three different PepsiCo operating divisions: PepsiCo Americas Foods (which includes Frito-Lay in the United States and Canada, Sabritas in Mexico and Latin Americas Foods in Brazil, Colombia, Argentina, Venezuela and Peru.), PepsiCo Europe and PepsiCo Asia, Middle East & Africa. In 2010, worldwide annual sales of Cheetos totaled approximately $4 billion, making it the 11th-largest PepsiCo brand.