Cheetos

Cheetos

The current Cheetos logo, used since 2002.
Product type	Cheese curl
Owner	Frito-Lay
Country	United States
Introduced	1948
Markets	Australia, Austria, Canada, China, Cyprus, Egypt, France, Greece, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Iran, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Lebanon, Lithuania, Macedonia, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, North America, Pakistan, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, South Africa, South America, South Korea, Turkey, Spain, Ukraine, United Kingdom, United States
Previous owners	PepsiCo and Kraft Foods
Website	Official website

Cheetos (formerly styled as Chee-tos until 1998) is a brand of cheese-flavored, puffed cornmeal snacks made by Frito-Lay, a subsidiary of PepsiCo. Fritos creator Charles Elmer Doolin invented Cheetos in 1948, and began national distribution in the U.S. The initial success of Cheetos was a contributing factor to the merger between The Frito Company and H.W. Lay & Company in 1961 to form Frito-Lay. In 1965 Frito-Lay became a subsidiary of The Pepsi-Cola Company, forming PepsiCo, the current owner of the Cheetos brand.

In 2010, Cheetos was ranked as the top selling brand of cheese puffs in its primary market of the United States; worldwide the annual retail sales totaled approximately $4 billion. The original Crunchy Cheetos are still in production but the product line has since expanded to include 21 different types of Cheetos in North America alone. As Cheetos are sold in more than 36 countries, the flavor and composition is often varied to match regional taste and cultural preferences—such as Savory American Cream in China, and Strawberry Cheetos in Japan.

Cheetos were invented in 1948 by Fritos creator Charles Elmer Doolin, who cooked early test batches in the Frito Company's Dallas, Texas-based research and development kitchen. The cheese-flavored snack sold quickly, but Doolin did not have the production or distribution capacity to support a nationwide launch. This led Doolin to partner with potato chip businessman Herman W. Lay for marketing and distribution, and Cheetos were introduced nationally in the U.S. in 1948 along with a potato product called Fritatos. The success of Cheetos prompted Doolin and Lay to merge their two companies in 1961, forming Frito-Lay Inc. At the time, Cheetos was one of four large snack food brands produced by the company, which had annual revenues of $127 million. Frito-Lay merged with the Pepsi-Cola Company to form PepsiCo in 1965, prompting further distribution of Cheetos outside of North America.

While Cheetos was the first snack food of its kind, competing products in the snack food category have since emerged—including Utz Cheese Curls, Herr's Cheese Curls and Wise Cheez Doodles. Most of the competing cheese-flavored snacks are distributed in specific regions of the U.S., and as of 2010 Cheetos remains as the top-selling cheese puff in America.