Taco Bell learned an important lesson in early 2012: If you have a new food product with the word “Doritos” in front of it, you could sell a whole lot of that food product. The Doritos Locos taco sold 100 million tacos in ten weeks—eighteen years fewer than it took McDonald’s to sell its first 100 million burgers—and it’s inspired a Doritos-flavored food craze. The latest to hop on the bandwagon? Dallas’ favorite homegrown international convenience store chain, 7-11, which is bringing something called “Doritos Loaded” to stores July 2.
7-11 has been pushing for a bigger slice of the fast-food pie of late, adding pizzas baked in-store to its roster of ever-rotisseried hot dogs and surprisingly-pretty-good donuts, and the Doritos Loaded snack seeks to make 7-11 a premiere destination for people who like to put things in their bodies that might make them feel bad about themselves afterward.
To be clear, the Doritos Loaded is something that sounds appealing, in a self-destructive sort of way: These are fried, breaded triangles of cheese, in a crust of Doritos, for you to eat—sort of like mozzarella sticks, but with a sharper cheese, and with breading that will leave your fingers in the satisfying orange powder that says “Doritos” to people around the world.
The product is in testing at the moment, with Dallas locations seeing a number of opportunities to ingest the exciting new food product before they launch nationally on next month. And if you want to know exactly what they’ll taste like, a patron who ate one and Tweeted about it at a test in Washington DC told his story to Yahoo! Food:
“They tasted like Nacho Cheese Doritos dipped in queso,” Cobb told us in an email. “The smell was awesome and distinctly Dorito-y.” He likened the texture to that of a mozzarella stick, although he’d expected them to be crunchier. That said, Cobb said he’d order them again.
“Nacho Cheese Doritos dipped in queso” sounds a little bit like a description of heaven to us, albeit the sort that might end with self-loathing and punishment from your GI tract. Nonetheless, if you’re a fan of cheese, orange fingers, and guilty pleasures, Doritos Loaded may be the exact food product you’ve been waiting for to make 7-11 a destination for more than just gas—though patrons might get a little of that, too.
