Giving in to Doritos: The Quest
Saturday, June 28, 2008
Well, the Frito-Lay marketing ploy worked for a second straight summer. Today was grocery-shopping day. I hadn’t bought a bag of Doritos in over a year, not since the X-13D Flavor Experiment . . . which of course turned out to be the oddly compelling but ultimately quite gross Cheeseburger flavor. Now, today, I couldn’t bear to see the new black bag of Doritos in the grocery store one more time without having to taste the new mystery flavor for myself. I also picked up many delicious summer fruits, including a 20 lb. whole watermelon.
Look how happy Mr. Watermelon is to be embarking upon this historic Doritos marketing quest:
I did pay a visit to doritosthequest.com just to see what puzzle games they had devised. The games looked kind of cool. I didn’t stick around for very long and I definitely didn’t register for contest/prizes crap, but I did scan their “About The Quest” page, which starts with the following sentence: 
“Commence THE QUEST and you enter a world of mystery, lured by curiosity and consumer by challenges.”
Consumer by challenges? Sounds like a Freudian slip to me.
Curiosity and consumer indeed. Why do I keep falling for it?
By the way, at first I thought the new Quest flavor was something like Tostitos Hint of Lime, but slightly less appealing. And then I ate a few more. There’s a lot of citric acid and buttermilk powder involved. It turns out that the flavor is actually a salty dust-goo form of Mountain Dew. The color of the powder is green/yellow like the soda. I can’t decide whether this is worse than Cheeseburger (X-13D) or not. No, I think it is worse. Now you can drink and eat your Mountain Dew. Blech. I kind of feel sick. I don’t really even like Mountain Dew in liquid form. I think I’ll stick to water and chips from the natural aisle.
Actually, right now I’m going to go work on my watermelon, strawberries and blueberries again. Maybe I’ll carve a wife for Mr. Watermelon as I wash my mouth of residual MSG.
Status of flavor quest: FAIL.