Frito-Lay test kitchen video shows how new chip flavors are made – NBC 5 Dallas-Fort Worth

Football season is snack season and you may not realize a lot of the work to develop new chips and flavors happens in our own backyard.

PepsiCo’s Plano headquarters employs roughly 3,700 people with a focus on research and development for Frito-Lay chips.

Senior Research Chef Steven Dominguez says all their corn chips start the same way by making masa, but come fall they look for ways to capture ‘gameday’ flavors.

“We have teams who specialize in that research, and they’ve told us football season comes around and people like spicy, people like cheesy, and people like smokey barbecue, especially here in Texas,” Dominguez said.

Take Super Bowl week – data from SNAC International, shows snack food sales surged to $742 million before the game in 2025. The trade group says that’s 22 billion pounds Americans purchased in just snacks for one game.

This year Tostitos introduced Spicy Queso Blanco chips.

“So we thought it would be cool to have a new flavor that could be found as both as a dip and as a chip,” Dominguez said.

He says ideas can come from anywhere, but it all starts in their test kitchen.

“We talk to consumers every day, and what they tell us is what we create,” said Dominguez.

Many flavors begin as a dish, like brisket to inspire a BBQ chip.

“The gold standard for our Doritos BBQ is inspired by brisket with a special sauce that we developed right here, topped with a special blend of a specific type of cheese,” Dominguez said.

The process he said can involve cooking several different versions of the dish before a final recipe is approved.

“Consumers will tell us – ‘Nah, I really don’t like that. I like it better when the garlic came earlier on, or I liked it better when the heat was in the back, not in the front.’ And those are all things that we look for in developing new flavors,” Dominguez said.

Once a dish is packed into one bite-sized snack, it heads to expert tasters – yes, that’s their title.

“They have to get trained for at least 100 hours on our products,” said Katie Marston, Sensory Science Director for Research and Development at PepsiCo Foods.

“[Expert tasters] have sensory acuity, so that they can tell the difference between sweet, sour, bitter, umami, those types of flavors.”

The team sometimes visits three times a week to sample and test products.

“Some things like a new flavor can be simple for us to do here at PepsiCo, so it’s a shorter window, but there can be times when we’re creating a new shape, like the scoop. That took several years to really kind of craft that design to make sure it’s a great vessel for dip,” Marston said.

One test involves red light. It’s something the company used when developing its Simply NKD line — Doritos and Cheetos without dyes or artificial flavors.

Katy Blakey gets you ready for snack season so you can win your next football watch party.

“The [red light] kind of equilibrates the senses a little bit so you won’t be able to tell that one has no color added, and one is the traditional Dorito,” Marston said.

Under the red light our NBC 5 crew could not see a difference in the two types of chips. Both looked the same.

After feedback from expert tasters, the company says they know instant feedback will follow as soon as bags hits store shelves.

“People call us whether they have a great experience and not so great experience,” Marston said. “And if we didn’t nail it, we always reserve that right to get better,” Marston said.