Food Theory: Are Doritos a RIP OFF?

don't fall for it again matt not again sure that bag of doritos looks like a deal there on the shelf but you know what's gonna happen you're gonna open it up and it'll be 84 air and 16 chip happens every time don't let them get the better of you with some cheap psychological trick matt don't let them hurt you again have some willpower do not buy those doritos no oh matthew tell me you didn't just eat an entire bag of doritos by yourself relax steph it was 84 air they all were [Music] hello internet welcome to food theory the show that's here to crunch the numbers that matter most to your stomach friends of all the first world problems out there there are exactly two that i believe should be upgraded to the rank of actual problem one being that pizza boxes are too large to fit inside a normal refrigerator and the other being the outrageous amount of air inside of chip bags and yes it is indeed outrageous we went ahead and tested it busted out old water displacement method and everything we found the average volume of sealed doritos bags to be 3274 milliliters meanwhile the average volume of the chips with all the air vacuumed out was just 525 milliliters that means 84 of what is inside that bag is air 84 wrap your head around that one friends that is the equivalent of having a microwave delivered in a refrigerator box like why why are chip manufacturers so incredibly wasteful with their packaging why on earth would they willingly pay for more packaging material than necessary to shoulder the cost of shipping air all across the world they could easily ship the same amount of doritos in a bag half the volume so why don't they simply do that and pay for half as many trucks surely there is a reason for this that makes dollars and cents which leads me to wonder are chip manufacturers using deceptive packaging to trick consumers into paying more for less like how those seemingly huge chocolate bunnies you get around easter always wind up being hollow or how the pepperonis on frozen pizza always seem to be denser when the packaging is clear on the other hand maybe frito-lay actually has a good reason for selling us bags filled with mostly air and if so i am all ears hollow chocolatey ears but we need answers and that's why today food theory is rolling up its sleeves getting its hands dusty and carrying out an experiment that'll answer this chippy little question once and for all are doritos bags fair or are they full of hot air that's all clickbait on you but the answers are actually really surprising now an important thing to note about the quote-unquote air inside of a doritos bag is that it's not actually air it's truly nitrogen gas now if that sounds like a dangerous substance for your food basket don't worry it's fine in fact 78 of the air filling your lungs at this very moment is nitrogen gas oxygen only makes up about 21 of the air that we breathe whitefield chip bags with nitrogen gassy ass because chips are actually able to stay fresh longer in an oxygen free environment o2 molecules like to create chemical reactions with all sorts of different partners and these reactions are a big reason why food tends to go stale n2 molecules on the other hand are more stable they don't tend to react with other molecules nearly as easily plus aerobic bacteria can't survive without oxygen so that's a little perk of the job long story short nitrogen gas plays a super important role inside your doritos bag but still gotta wonder does there really need to be so much of the gas in there sure chips may need an oxygen free environment to stay fresh but why couldn't nitrogen gas fill a smaller bag with the same number of doritos inside appropriately sized bags can be oxygen free too you know which brings us to the other role that nitrogen gas plays inside our doritos bag slack fill ever notice how your chip bag is filled almost all the way but it's never completely inflated and stretched out like a balloon this is actually by design and it allows the nitrogen gas to exist as a relaxed cushion around your chips protecting them from damage during transport leaving the bag slightly under filled prevents the bag from popping too easily especially when it's traveling at high altitudes where atmospheric pressures diminish now i can definitely understand why you wouldn't want your bag of doritos to pop before it gets to the store and i also get how a pocket of air could help protect doritos if something were to impact the bag but what about if the bag gets shaken having empty space surrounding the doritos seems to fly in the face of everything we know about safety equipment like i don't know seat belts which are designed to keep passengers snug in place so they don't rattle around inside the vehicle during an accident maybe i'm just grasping at straws here but i'm just not convinced that frito-lay would inject that much air into their bags just to make sure that the chips don't break for one thing nitrogen gas doesn't seem to be doing a heck of a great job protecting the chips from breaking i sent field researcher luke out to examine three dozen nine and a quarter ounce bags of nachos cheesier by weighing hundreds of full unbroken doritos we were able to determine that an average dorito chip weighs 1.81 grams the contents of a single doritos bag averaged 241.5 grams bit less than the 262.5 that they claim on the packaging meaning that our doritos bags would have held an average of 133 full unbroken chips when they were prepared at the factory but by the time they made their journey from the factory to the grocery store and eventually to luke's house only 33.1 percent of the chips managed to stay intact 67 of all the doritos we bought were broken by the time that the bag was opened this means that while a typical doritos bag leaves the factory with roughly 133 unbroken ships inside only about 33 of them arrive at the destination fully intact a hundred break along the way and look i get that broken doritos aren't the worst thing in the world it's not like we're talking about fine china or a ps5 that gets rendered useless when it breaks in half in my experience broken doritos are just as delicious as unbroken doritos but still 67 braking strikes me as a pretty high casualty rate for a product that supposedly fills its bags with a special gas in order to prevent that very thing from happening i just can't escape the feeling that at least part of doritos goal here is to trick consumers with oversized deceptive packaging and so we designed an experiment to test whether all that extra air space in the bag really helps or if a different amount of gas might actually be more effective at keeping your doritos intact we began by gathering every single unbroken dorito from all 36 nacho cheesier bags it took a while but luckily there were plenty of broken doritos available to munch on whenever hunger struck we then took 133 of those unbroken doritos chips and sealed them away inside an empty bag this theoretically is how a typical nine and a quarter ounce doritos bag begins life in a factory before any of the doritos actually gets broken during the transport process we call this one the average bag since it was filled with average number of doritos we made two other average bags each with 133 unbroken doritos inside then sealed all three bags with 2 749 milliliters of atmospheric air giving all of the bags the average 3274 milliliters of total volume and the typical 84 air to 16 dorito ratio yes we took this way too seriously but if we don't take it that seriously who else will and yes just so we get everything on the table we used atmospheric air instead of nitrogen gas but we decided not to worry about it since keeping the doritos fresh isn't a concern for this particular experiment we then prepared a second set of doritos bags much the same way except we only put about half the normal number of doritos inside 67. we called this set of three bags the fewer chips bags since pretty self-explanatory they only had eight percent doritos by volume finally we prepared three more chips bags which contained go figure more than the usual amount of doritos inside originally we'd plan to put 266 unbroken doritos or twice the average amount inside each of these three bags but we ran into a problem the chips wouldn't fit that's right despite the fact that 266 doritos takes up way less volume than the bag's capacity of 3 274 milliliters they were so awkwardly shaped that they simply couldn't all fit inside without being broken first see also our film theory episode on the coins and scrooge mcduck's money bin for a deeper dive on this exact concept and why yes we do parody the ducktales theme song in that episode thanks for asking anyway in the end we had to reduce the number of doritos in our more chips bags down to 163 that was the absolute maximum number of intact doritos we were able to fit inside each bag and even get that many in we had to carefully line them up side by side tightly against each other our more chips bags ultimately wound up with 20 doritos by volume but uh gotta admit it was not easy and honestly the whole process of refilling the doritos bags made us realize something really important 133 unbroken doritos is basically the maximum number of chips that can fit loosely in a doritos bag it was actually pretty tough to get the bag closed with 133 loose chips inside in the first place we had to shake it down a fair bit to make it work sure there's a lot of air space inside the bag by the time it travels to the store and makes it to the grocery cart but that's because a lot of chips have broken by that point look at it from the perspective of the worker at the frito-lay factory every bag they ship out from the factory is probably filled to the brim with perfect unbroken doritos so it was at this point in the experiment that we first felt a twinge of guilt about making this episode in the first place somewhere in the back of our minds we began to understand that doritos wasn't actually trying to trick us with deceptive packaging they were actually just doing their very best to get the delicious tortilla chips out to the people of the world nevertheless we choked back these sentimental feelings because science doesn't care about your feelings and we pressed onward now it was time for the fun part putting our experimental doritos bags through a series of tortures all right it was just like two tortures also they weren't really tortures we just kind of recreated the jostling and squeezing a real doritos bag might encounter during the shipping process after some trial and error we developed two tests that when carried out back-to-back inflicted the perfect amount of damage since the real-life doritos bags from the store averaged a breakage rate of 67 we tweaked our dorito torture such that they broke approximately 67 of the doritos in the average bags as well first dorito torture pressing we gently laid a 25 pound or 11.4 kilogram weight on top of each doritos bag for 10 seconds this low impact high pressure stress test was designed to assess how well each bag's air cushion protected the doritos inside judging by the amount of crunching we heard from each bag it's fair to say that the fewer chips bag which contained the fewest doritos and the largest air cushion had fewer doritos broken during the test than the other fuller bags did the second torture i mean highly scientific test was to drop the bags onto the ground from a height of eight feet this sudden high impact trial was meant to test the seat belt theory that doritos packed tightly into a bag are better protected than loosely packed doritos finally after all bags were dropped it was time to open them up and assess the damage first up were the more chips bags and these guys had a rough time under that 25 pound weight i wasn't expecting a whole lot of doritos to be intact and i was certainly right to think that of the 163 doritos we packed inside each more chips bag only 33 of the chips made it out unscathed on average for a breakage rate of nearly 80 percent next we opened up the average bags by design 33.3 chips per bag made it through our doritos tortures unbroken for a breakage rate of about 75 so the average bag clearly outperformed the more chips bag not only was its breakage rate lower but the average bag actually produced more unbroken chips overall which is surprising since it had fewer chips to work with last but certainly not least we had ourselves the fewer chip bags well i guess they actually are leased since they have the fewest number of chips but whatever i still think they're pretty great anyway an average of 14.7 of every 67 chips made it through intact giving the fewer chips bag a breakage rate of 78.1 percent that's right theorists the average bag patterned after the way frito lay actually fills their bags in real life performed the best hands down packing more doritos into the bag resulted in a higher percentage of broken doritos placing fewer doritos into the bag resulted in a higher breakage rate as well the kicker is that the average bags produced an average of 33.3 unbroken chips per bag the highest number of intact chips of any of our three competitors period so at this point i'm busting out the couch and the sad music because this youtuber owes doritos an apology since the dawn of the internet chip makers have been getting dragged for putting so much air into their chip bags and i guess i got wrapped up in it all yeah i'll admit it when i first set out to make this video i figured it would wind up being a bit of a takedown episode that showed how doritos packaging is deceptive and doesn't actually help protect the chips but the numbers are in and doritos straight up slap me down on both fronts today's experiment demonstrates that the slack fill approach can't keep most doritos in the bag from breaking but the 84 gas to 16 chip ratio does cut down on chip breakage more than other fill ratios so hats off to you doritos i'm sorry that i ever doubted you and hats off to our sponsor for today's episode noom steph and i have been using the health program noom for a couple months now and this thing is sneaky effective has this way of suggesting tiny little life changes that snowball into big legit health improvements in our lifestyle see i'm not exactly what you call a diet person i mean clearly i'm not i just spent the last week testing entire bags of doritos but gotta say i have been really impressed with the simplicity and approach of noom's program like the other day the program suggested that i should just try working my favorite green food into my diet joke's on them my favorite green food is green m m's booyah no but in all seriousness it's broccoli closely followed by asparagus seems too easy to actually work right and yet here i am four days later in the recording booth i just finished eating breakfast and i worked spinach into my morning eggs for the third consecutive morning and i think that's because noob's approach is different from anything i've tried before they're really focused on disrupting behaviors and routines using proven psychology and cognitive behavioral therapy practice and this is by no means the most impressive part of their program not even close but something that's been shockingly helpful for me is how it lets me track my water intake i've been trying to get better about drinking water since forever and this noom is somehow getting me to finally do it anyway if an app that uses psychological tactics to lead you to a healthier lifestyle sounds like your cup of tea take your free 30 second quiz using my link in the description to get started today so far the program's been really clicking with steph and i who knows maybe the fourth theory channel will wind up being fitness related huh huh fitness theory but seriously just follow the link in the description to take noom's quiz to get yourself started again it is literally 30 seconds long and completely free and while you're doing that always remember it's all just a theory a food theory bon appetit

Channel: The Food Theorists

Views: 368,745

Rating: 4.9673023 out of 5

Keywords: doritos, doritos bag, doritos bags, doritos bag air, how much air in a doritos bag, chips, snack food, chip bag, chip bag air, doritos recipe, food, recipe, food theory, food theorists, matpat, game theory, film theory, eat the menu, binging with babish, delish, food tik tok, tik tok food, doritos commercial, doritos commercials, funny doritos commercials

Id: ycNSY3d1WLc

Length: 14min 54sec (894 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 12 2021