Doritos marks 30 years in the UK with thicker chip and ‘striking’ marketing

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Food Brand OTY

Winner: Doritos

Reformulating a £290m brand is a full of risk. But the risk has paid off for PepsiCo’s new, non-HFSS Doritos.

The 24% less salt and 15% less fat recipe rolled out across Cool Original, Tangy Cheese and Chilli Heatwave in October. Not only was it healthier, but the new, thicker chip provided “a better base to load with salsas and dips”, said PepsiCo.

The move, which coincided with Doritos’ 30th anniversary in the UK, was no knee-jerk reaction. It was the result of “years of meticulous research, development and testing”, and followed a £13m investment into PepsiCo’s Coventry site in July.

Plus, PepsiCo had already tested the non-HFSS chip with its Extra Flamin’ Hot flavour Doritos, which hit shelves in March 2024. The line generated £23.8m in its first 10 months, backed by a multimillion-pound push and “striking” in-store materials.

Then, in early 2025, Doritos teamed up with A Minecraft Movie for a promotion. It hid square chips inside 100 Chilli Heatwave packs, which came with a cash prize of up to £10k.

The revamp of the Doritos recipe – and canny marketing efforts – unanimously impressed our judges.

Doritos set the “gold standard” for how brands can work with retailers effectively, one said. Another described the reformulation work as “very impressive, strategically and executionally – sometimes we take this stuff for granted, but it’s incredibly hard”.