Check Out How Cheez Doodles Just Totally Cheesed Up Its New Packaging

Americans spent about $1.4 billion on cheese snacks this year, and few brands know that better than Wise. The snack giant has been making Cheez Doodles since the early 1950s—extruding them at a rate of 220 doodles a second at its plant in Berwick, Pa., Wise turns out an estimated 15 million pounds of Cheez Doodles every year. (That comes to 65 million bags.) But even with a steady demand for puffs, Wise can't take its market share for granted with Pirate's Booty, Frito-Lay's Cheetos and Utz's Cheese Curls all competing in the space. It's why, after years of merely puffing along, Wise is rolling out a revamped Cheez Doodles, featuring three new flavors and dramatically updated packaging. "We do have a lot of loyal customers, but the brand was due for a refresh," said Wise Foods CMO Jeremy Bjork. A veteran from competitor Frito-Lay, Bjork joined Wise about 18 months ago. One of the first things he noticed, he said, was that Cheez Doodles had the potential to be more than just another snack offering from Wise—it could be a brand that could stand on its own. But for that to happen, he said, "We needed to contemporize the product." Much of that contemporizing is on display right on the bag. Wise decided, logically enough, to use cheese as the thematic grounding for its new image. (See below graphic for the specific updates.) "A name like Cheez Doodles is really simple and straightforward, and it emphasizes the cheese. We thought we could own that," explained Simon Thorneycroft, CEO and founder of Perspective: Branding, the firm that redesigned the packaging. "We know it tastes good, but if we can emphasize the word cheese and build visual equity around cheese, that's the heart of the brand promise." And how do you build visual equity around cheese? Let us count the ways. Out went the yellow background oval behind the brand name to be replaced by a wheel of cheddar. The cheese puffs shown on the package are actual photos (the old ones were artist renderings), and the name "Cheez" is much bigger now—so big, in fact, that it crowds the Wise logo into the upper left corner. Just for good measure, there's also a wedge of cheese on the bag, with chunks of crumbled cheese falling off it. "These are all cues to reinforce the cheesiness of the product," Bjork said. ("Cheesy" isn't normally a flattering adjective to apply to a brand, but Cheez Doodles is the apparent exception.) One contentious issue surrounding the redesign was the decision to feature cheese dust—you know, that orange stuff that gets on your fingers and everyplace else—on the bag itself. Thorneycroft concedes that cheese dust can be stomach-turning for some people, which is why "most brands like to hide it." But for puff aficionados, "That stuff equals flavor," he said. "So we put it on the package. We showed the dust." (For a peek at a few bag designs that didn't make the final cut, scroll down.) Meanwhile, Wise has rolled out three new flavors as part of the update: Cheez Doodles Extreme, an extra-spicy flavor with a touch of lemon; Cheez Doodles Queso Habanero; and Cheez Doodles Baseballs, a limited-time, white-cheddar puff co-branded with the New York Mets. The new flavors, along with the new packaging, Bjork explained, are geared toward younger consumers. Thorneycroft added that it took guts for Wise to essentially scrap a recognizable bag and take the chance of staking its brand reputation on cheese alone. Even so, he pointed out, don't people reach for cheese puffs because they like cheese? "It's just about honesty," he said. "It allows the cheese to be the brand." Just for the record, cheese puffs weren't always about cheese. Today's Cheez Doodles are descended from experiments that agronomists searching for new types of animal feed conducted in the 1930s. After World War II, a food technician named Morrie Yohai reprised the technique of piping cornmeal through an extruder while working for the Old London Melba Toast plant in the Bronx, N.Y. At the time, Yohai later said, he was just looking for a new kind of snack. When he sprayed the resulting puffs with cheddar dust and called it a "doodle," he made history.

Brand Marketing

Check Out How Cheez Doodles Just Totally Cheesed Up Its New Packaging

Iconic snack food embraces the orange dust

Robert Klara

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Robert Klara