Snack giant Doritos has teamed up with food tech startup NotCo to launch co-branded vegan products with the iconic Flamin’ Hot flavour in Chile.
Known for its groundbreaking partnerships with food industry giants, Chilean food tech unicorn NotCo has unveiled its latest plant-based products that incorporate a renowned snack flavour.
The startup has collaborated with PepsiCo-owned tortilla chip behemoth Doritos to launch Flamin’ Hot Not Chicken Nuggets, as well as the nacho-cheese-infused NotMayo Doritos.
The result of an eight-month effort, the two products are available in NotCo’s home market of Chile, priced at $4.20 each. “Doritos, to me, is one of those things that you don’t need to be hungry to want one,” said NotCo co-founder and CEO Matias Muchnick.
“The conversation began with a random connection. That quickly led us to a ‘what if?’ (which is the same as a ‘why not’, but reimagined),” he explained. “There were no infinite decks or eternal presentations. There was just a desire to do it. There were guts and common sense to move forward.”
How NotCo and Doritos created the new products
While the ingredients of either of the new products have not yet been revealed, they bear a resemblance to NotCo’s core products. Its Not Chicken Nuggets are made from a base of flour, sunflower oil, pea and bean protein, wheat gluten, while the original NotMayo contains soybean and sunflower oils, modified starch, spirit vinegar, chickpea flour, and more.
The collaboration blends these innovations with the signature seasonings created by Frito-Lay, the PepsiCo subsidiary that owns Doritos, Cheetos, Lay’s and other snack brands. Flamin’ Hot originally contains a range of spices, cheese, MSG and food dyes, and the classic Doritos cheese flavour combines Cheddar and Romano cheeses with buttermilk, whey concentrate, and a host of spices.
NotCo is known for turning CPG classics vegan, using Giuseppe, its artificial intelligence platform. It sifts through an almost infinite number of combinations to find the most suitable ingredients to replace animal-derived ones, complementing the work of food scientists, chefs, and product developers, from concept creation all the way to the final version of the formula.
“When we sat down with the PepsiCo team, everything moved fast. The first thing was to try something out, and that was our bet – go big or go home,” said Muchnick. “Step one from Giuseppe? A Doritos ice cream sandwich covered in chocolate with Doritos-flavoured ice cream.
“There were several of us at the table, and being a somewhat perceptive person, I noticed the immediate faces of: ‘What the hell did we get ourselves into?’ And rightfully so,” he recalled.
But it was Benjamin Herrera, the marketing director for PepsiCo’s South Cone division, who stepped up and cracked the code. “I stared at him and saw the look on his face that screamed: ‘Holy shit,’ but he didn’t say it,” said Muchnick. “Instead, he smiled provocatively… and said: ‘Let’s go all in.’”
Creating a Doritos-flavoured NotMayo “was too obvious not to do”, argued Muchnick, outlining how it made Doritos “even more Doritos-y”.
“Then we jumped into the Flamin’ Hot craze and, with our collective obsession over Shaq’s reaction on one of YouTube’s most-watched shows, Hot Ones, we said: Not Chicken Nuggets Flamin’ Hot? Why (the fuck) not?” he added.
NotCo bets on AI tech to recreate more classics
Herrera called the two products “intense, unexpected, daring and built with the best of both worlds: the power of Doritos’ intense and iconic flavour and NotCo’s food technology”.
“This positions us at PepsiCo Southern Cone as a centre of talent and innovation. Because we are a global company, but we think locally in all the markets where we operate,” he said. “Thinking glocal is what allows us to continue surprising and growing.”
The new nuggets and mayo will be produced by NotCo and sold by both brands, and other co-developed products will follow soon.
PepsiCo is far from the only food and beverage leader working with NotCo, either on co-branded items or on tailored product development. Mars, Mondelēz International and Nestlé are all leveraging its AI platform to speed up their R&D and improve products.
“Usually, they need better nutritional labels, [and] more cost-efficient formulations. Regulations are changing all the time. Governments are pushing towards having better products from many aspects,” Karim Pichara, co-founder and CTO of NotCo, told Green Queen in March. “Now, we have several projects with all these companies that are related to reformulation and end-to-end product creation.”
Most notably, NotCo has formed a joint venture with The Kraft Heinz Company, which sells plant-based versions of classics like the blue-box mac and cheese and Oscar Mayer hot dogs in North America. This month, they released mac and cheese cups and chipotle-flavoured mayo to the market.
The company recently unveiled a new GLP Booster powder for people who have weaned off Ozempic and other weight-loss drugs, or those who can’t or don’t want to use them.
It’s already the largest alternative protein player in Latin America, and has teased more launches over the coming months. “We have a few products with some companies in Latin America, and also in the US and in Europe, where we are building entirely new concepts for them,” said Pichara.
“There are several products – very iconic and famous products – that are going to be rolled out this year with a newer version, and we were the ones that reformulated those,” he added.
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