One of my early childhood memories in 1960 was walking to grade school toting my Alvin and the Chipmunks lunchbox packed with a baloney sandwich, an apple and a bag of Fritos, my favorite snack.
During the Depression in the 1930s, Charles Elmer Doolin had a confectionery in San Antonio. Always an innovator, he was looking for a kind of corn snack to sell. Fried tortillas staled too quickly, so Doolin was a man on a mission. He happened upon, Gustavo Olguin from Oaxaca, Mexico selling a snack from his small stand at a local gas station. Little bags of corn strips extruded from masa (maize dough made from ground corn) deep-fried and lightly salted. He called them fritos, “little fried things” — the beach food of Mexico.
He sold the recipe and equipment to Doolin for $100 and the Frito Company was established in his mother’s kitchen. She perfected the recipe but Olguin’s painstakingly slow and cumbersome cooking procedure needed upgrading. Doolin and his brother Earl were modern, can-do innovative tinkerers. So, they took Henry Ford’s idea of the assembly line and conveyor belt and applied it to the manufacture of the Frito, first in their family kitchen expanding later into their factories.
The rest is snack food history. To keep his Fritos corn chips fresh and protected in shipment, he developed a bag packaging process. Sales in grocery stores were on the decline so he initiated the snack bag display holder to be placed on the checkout counters to attract last minute sales on the way out. These two concepts proved to be very successful and is still utilized today in snack manufacturing and retail outlet displays.
I remember taking my family to the Casa de Fritos, a Mexican restaurant in Disneyland’s Frontierland complete with roaming Mariachi’s. Fritos were everywhere, confirming it was still my favorite snack after 40 years. Unfortunately, it no longer exists in the “Happiest Place On Earth”, but remains a wonderful memory.
By the time of his death in 1959, C.E. Doolin had partnered with Herman Lay, of potato chip fame and the Frito-Lay brand had gone global with a US yearly revenue of over $70 billion.
Its gift to our children is that they can enjoy endless varieties of Fritos, Cheetos and Doritos (while generations still practice the age-old tradition of licking orange cheese powder from their fingers). Not a bad legacy that started out as a little extruded masa corn strip, deep fried, bagged and sold at a gas station some 92 years ago.