The Doritos Nacho Cheese flavor is iconic. It has made its way into a variety of products: dips, jerky and more. In 2023, Doritos was looking for another unexpected use for Nacho Cheese. Coincidentally, flavor company Empirical came to Doritos with a new angle on its flagship flavor: a Nacho Cheese–infused spirit. It was the perfect opportunity to excite our Gen Z audience, which was just reaching drinking age.

But Doritos and Empirical faced a challenge launching this drink. Amid a market flooded with snack-flavored spirits, theirs risked appearing as just another artificially flavored one. But it wasn’t. Unlike competitors, the spirit was genuinely infused with Nacho Cheese flavor via a careful distillation process.

Our objective? Generate excitement for the spirit’s launch, despite similar ventures from other brands, and prove to Gen Z that the spirit was truly infused with Nacho Cheese.

To tease the release of the spirit and prove that it was authentically flavored with the Nacho Cheese from our chips, we had a comically simple creative idea: remove the Nacho Cheese flavor from our chips. Yep. For the first time in 50 years, we temporarily ruined our #1-selling product to launch a new product. Titled “No Nacho Cheese,” these chips were stripped of their signature flavor, and their packaging was stripped of half its typical fire-red color to hint that things were not normal inside. These visually striking and culinarily underwhelming chips would become the perfect fodder for Gen Z influencers to review and share videos of online, helping to spread the question “Where did the Nacho Cheese flavor go?” among our core Gen Z audience and drive anticipation for its return in a novel form.

A mixture of qualitative audience workshops and quantitative surveys showed us that our Gen Z audience was hungrier than ever for new experiences, amplified by a chunk of their formative years spent in lockdown.

Armed with this insight, our PR strategy for launching the spirit crystallized: We would temporarily remove the flavor from our top-selling chip, then give it back in a whole new form. This would get our audience hyped to see where the flavor was going (classic loss aversion) while building credibility that our spirit was authentically infused with real Nacho Cheese. We would send bags of Nacho Cheese–less chips to Gen Z influencers to get their followers speculating where the flavor went. We’d also create imagery of the bag and the spirit to use across social and to send to media so they could run with the story once news of the spirit was released.

A week before the spirit dropped, we sent limited-edition bags of No Nacho Cheese to influencers in the worlds of gaming, fashion and food to closely align with the main interests of our Gen Z demographic. TikTok videos of our intentionally bland chips got their followers wondering where the flavor went.

We added fuel to the fire by acting mystified, asking, “Where did the Nacho Cheese flavor go?” across the Doritos social channels. Some fans had ideas. Others made threats to get us to bring the Nacho Cheese back. We then put people’s most outrageous guesses onto 20+ digital billboards around NYC to draw an even wider audience into the mystery.

As chatter about No Nacho Cheese spread on TikTok, Instagram and X, Gen Z’s curiosity was piqued, setting the stage for the unveiling of our cheesy spirit a week later at a launch party in NYC and online.

We achieved over 13.1M social media impressions and nearly 54,000 social engagements. The momentum extended beyond Gen Z. We received coverage on platforms like Good Morning America and CNN, propelling our campaign to 9.7B online media impressions and 41M broadcast impressions. Moreover, the spirit sold out in just 5.5 hours. Ultimately, by dropping the flavor from our limited-edition chips, we helped create one of the most buzzworthy product drops in Doritos history and boosted our cultural relevance with Gen Z. The ripple effect extended to the broader brand: total Doritos sales grew by 4% and Nacho Cheese sales grew by 3%. We also saw a 28-point lift in unaided brand awareness. And the visual identity created for the collab helped elevate Doritos’ brand image, proving it was more than just a snack brand, able to enter completely new, more high-end categories and experiences.