X-13D Doritos

Doritos X-13D Flavor Experiment is an impressive effort and a fun chip-tasting exercise. Much like Kettle's test-flavor packs, Doritos has created a new flavor of chip, but rather than let 'the people' choose which flavor to keep, Doritos has released one mystery flavor, and you have to decide what to name it. Of course, in choosing to name it, you also need to figure out what it is.

While it is clearly a marketing gimmick, and I don't like the stilted ways they have crafted to "interact with the brand" I can't help but be excited about a new chip flavor. Especially one wrapped up in blind taste-testing packaging. It's like they decided to make a chip just for me!

I can only hope this is the beginning of a new more creative push for Doritos. While they have been no doubt inspired by Kettle Chips, I would imagine that with Doritos getting into the "crazy new limited flavors" game there will be many, many followers and some truly amazing, weird, delicious, and probably wonderfully terrible new chip flavors coming soon. But back to the task at hand...

Packaging

The first thing you notice is the Darth Vader inspired packaging. X-13D is clearly a dark experiment by some mad scientist. The X-13D is very front and center, and it doesn't help that this mysterious flavor showed up when my own Lost-mania was at its peak. Clearly there are hints to its true flavor.

The most obvious clue to the flavor is what is printed as Tasting Notes: "All-American Classic".

I'm sure just from that one clue many people have an idea of where we are headed. Turning the bag over and looking at the ingredients, while revealing, is also a very scary idea. These chips are not vegan, hell, these chips aren't even vegetarian!

Tasting

The initial taste is dill, which I love in a chip! As that fades there is that familiar powdered cheese flavor, and then a rise of smokey something that is quickly killed by a very specific mustard taste. I found that it evoked an immediate sense of a guilty-pleasure. I like this chip!

Internets

The front of the package leads us to SnackStrongProductions.com, with the tagline "Take snacking to the next level" and a terrible flash-based interface that looks like a cross between an amusement park and the climatic final scene of a Bruce Willis action film. The waving lights guide us to X-13D which takes us to a new website, x13d.doritos.com where we can complete some very easy "puzzles" to get clues on what the flavor is. Here are the results I got:

The Solution

Clearly the new flavor is a cheeseburger. Pickle (dill), cheese, the smokey meat flavor and actual beef ingredients, and mustard. I think it goes beyond just 'a' burger however. I think it is 'the' burger. My belief is that this is a McDonald's cheeseburger.

What is the 13th letter of the alphabet? M. Experiment MD. Experiment McDonald's.