Father of the Doritos Chips, Arch West, is dead at 97

Snack-food lovers partial to Doritos owe that pleasure, in large part, to Arch West. Mr. West, who died on Sept. 20 at the age of 97, was a leader of the team at Frito-Lay that developed Doritos corn chips, a Southwestern-inspired alternative to the traditional salted potato or corn chip.

Though the company, Frito-Lay North America, declines to give Mr. West full credit for the chip — “as a company, there’s never one person to invent or is the father or mother of a given product,” said Aurora Gonzalez, a spokeswoman — others do.

“He widely gets the credit for Doritos,” Andrew F. Smith, the author of the Encyclopedia of Junk Food and Fast Food (Greenwood Publishing Group, 2006), said in an interview.

Today, Doritos are Frito-Lay’s second-best seller, after Lays Potato Chips, both nationally and around the world, with total sales of nearly $5 billion annually.

Mr. West died at a hospital near his home in Dallas, his daughter, Jana Hacker, said. By her account, her father got the idea for Doritos in the early 1960s when he was vice president of marketing for what was then the Frito Company. (It is now a division of PepsiCo.) The family, while on vacation in San Diego, stopped at “a little shack restaurant where these people were making a fried corn chip,” she said.

The chip’s tangy taste captured her father’s attention. Back in Dallas, after Frito merged with the H. W. Lay Company, he promoted the Doritos’ production, which began in 1964, using corn tortillas cut into triangles and seasoned with cheese and chili flavorings.