Objectively I don’t understand these Doritos at all. Having said that they’re my go to flavour of Doritos. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan of the Nacho Cheese Doritos, but when I’m craving Doritos it’s almost always Cool Ranch. Before writing this review I lived in a certain blissful ignorance about the flavour. If you asked me what flavour Cool Ranch Doritos were, I would say “cool ranch”. It’s as if it was a flavour unto itself. Then when I finally decided to write this review a thought popped into my head, why do they call them “cool ranch”.

We can start with the cool, I assume that it has something to do with the slightly creamy flavour of the chips. I’m not sure I would define it as cool exactly, particularly when you compare it to menthol or mint. One could argue that often people go for creamy beverages when they eat food that is overly spicy, so then the cool in cool ranch is about cooling down spicy heat. I could be over thinking this whole thing, and maybe they’re using the word “cool” as in something that is good, like the Fonz from Happy Days. The second word in the name is a little more confusing, and that’s “ranch”. My best guess is that it’s supposed to be about the spices, and maybe they’re going for something like a ranch dressing. I guess that only because I can’t think of a better explanation. The problem is that these don’t taste like ranch salad dressing at all. Upon closer inspection I also noticed small red and green flakes on these Doritos. The green would match to my ranch salad dressing theory, but I’ve never had a ranch dressing with red flakes.

So what this means is that these chips are a creamy Dorito with some “ranch” like herbs, but not really. So if you agree with this theory, and boil it down, these are very bad ranch salad dressing flavoured corn chips. The bigger problem is that they taste really good. I’d go so far as to say that I enjoy these more than any ranch dressing I’ve ever tasted. I would actually really enjoy having a ranch dressing that tasted more like Cool Ranch Doritos. So while these chips might fail (assuming my theory is correct), they fail in the best way possible. By not making these actually taste like ranch dressing, they’ve created a flavour better than ranch dressing. These might be the greatest success out of failure in the history of snack foods.

I should also mention that I really love the crunch of Doritos. Balanced with this weird ranch flavour makes it one of my favourite salty snacks in the world.