Four Braces

When Disneyland opened in 1954, Frito-Lay sponsored an outdoor Mexican restaurant in Frontierland called Casa de Fritos. If you weren’t hungry enough for a full meal, you could drop a nickel (!) into a vending machine and walk off with a bag of Fritos corn chips. (The restaurant is still right there. For a while it was Casa Mexicana, hosted by Lowry Foods. Today it’s a Tex-Mex barbecue called Rancho Zocalo.) A local company named Alex’s Foods provided Casa de Fritos with fresh tortillas. Their salesman noticed Casa de Fritos was tossing out tortillas when they got stale, and he suggested they slice them into wedges, season them and fry them into chips. The crunchy triangles quickly became one of the most popular menu items. A Frito-Lay marketing executive fell in love with them and contracted with Alex’s Food to make more. In 1966 they were rolled out nationally as a Frito-Lay product under the name of Doritos.