In 2023, Doritos launched its “Try Another Angle” platform, focusing on bold activations to connect with ad-averse Gen Z. As part of this, Doritos introduced a Nacho Cheese–infused spirit to give Gen Z a twist on the classic. However, snack brands making spirits wasn’t new.

This led to our creative strategy: launching the spirit in a fresh way by removing the Nacho Cheese flavor from our chips to drive excitement for its return in a novel form. This resulted in the spirit’s selling out and other incredible outcomes. By ruining our flagship product, we successfully launched a new one.

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.

In America, Doritos Nacho Cheese has been the brand’s #1-selling flavor for over 50 years. So to take away the Nacho Cheese flavor from our chips in service of promoting the Nacho Cheese–infused spirit was pretty bold. But we had to be bold. Getting noticed by Gen Z isn’t easy, and the spirit category in America is flooded with brands pouring out one snack-infused creation after another. Think Velveeta, OREO, even Arby’s with their fry-flavored booze, to name a few. We couldn’t simply release our spirit into an already-crowded landscape and expect attention. We needed to earn it.

While Doritos ranked seventh in Gen Z’s most beloved brands (Morning Consult), qualitatively, we noticed a loss in cachet. Our fans told us, “Be bold. Be innovative. Stop being a wallflower.” Quotes like these were a wake-up call. If we didn’t find a way to stand out, we risked being left behind.

In early 2023, we launched a new creative platform to reengage our audience and help them see Doritos in an exciting new light. “Try Another Angle” would become our CTA to get Gen Z to take notice of the brand again and see it as more than the iconic snack they grew up with. The Nacho Cheese–infused spirit was part of the plan to give Gen Z a new way to enjoy Doritos.

No ordinary campaign would cut it. We needed a fresh way to get an ad-avoidant audience to lean in and anticipate the spirit’s release.

A mixture of qualitative audience workshops and quantitative surveys showed us that our Gen Z audience was hungrier than ever for new experiences, which was amplified by a chunk of their formative years being spent in lockdown. This posed an interesting challenge in launching a product with a classic, nostalgic Doritos flavor.

How do you encourage consumers to spice up their relationship with a flavor they’ve loved for years? Absence makes the heart grow fonder.

We knew we could make a bigger impact by taking away something they love rather than introducing something totally new—classic loss aversion. Our strategy crystallized: We would temporarily remove the flavor from our top-selling chips, then give it back in a whole new form. This would get our audience hyped to see where the flavor was going while building credibility that our spirit was authentically made with real Nacho Cheese flavor from the chips.

To demonstrate that Empirical took the actual Nacho Cheese flavor from our chips to craft the spirit, we took the Nacho Cheese flavor from our chips. Yep. We purposefully adjusted our #1-selling product and renamed it “No Nacho Cheese.” These chips lacked their signature flavor, and their packaging was stripped of half its color to hint that things weren’t normal within.

A week before the spirit’s launch, we distributed limited-edition bags of No Nacho Cheese to key influencers. Videos featuring these bland chips got their followers speculating where the flavor had gone. We added fuel to the fire by acting mystified and asking, “Where did the Nacho Cheese flavor go?” on the Doritos social channels and in OOH. As chatter about No Nacho Cheese spread on social, Gen Z’s curiosity was piqued, setting the stage for the unveiling of our spirit a week later at a launch party in NYC.

Within minutes of revealing that the flavor was missing because we’d put it in our new product, the topic on everyone’s lips was the Empirical x Doritos Nacho Cheese Spirit. 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, resulting in a 3.7% increase in unit sales, a 3.8% volume (lbs.) lift for Nacho Cheese and a 28-point lift in unaided brand awareness.