Why do we enjoy eating Cheetos the way we do? They turn our skin orange, and they tend to be pretty messy. We love them anyway, but it’s nothing short of a snacking miracle that Cheetos even exist. The puffy, cheesy snack we’ve come to know and love was produced by accident during the cleaning of equipment used by the Flakall Corporation to produce animal feed.

The Beloit, Wisconsin, based factory had been making animal feed for years. They took corn kernels and ran them through a grinder to flatten the kernels into flakes. The flakes allowed the feed to aerate better and last longer while in storage, but it also kept livestock from eating potentially sharp kernels. The flattened kernels, or flakes, were more palatable and easier for the cattle to eat. The design, however, wasn’t flawless, and every so often the equipment had to be cleaned to keep it from becoming clogged.

In order to clean the equipment, workers moistened the corn kernels and ran them through the grinder. What happened to the moistened kernels though, wasn’t the same as the dry kernels. Instead of getting a flat flake, the corn puffed up when it was exposed to the heat of the machine. It produced big puffy kernels, just like popcorn, but without the annoying kernels.

It was worker Edward Wilson that would be the first one to taste the puffy snack the cleaning process produced. He took some of the puffy “residue” home, seasoned it up good, and had it as a snack. It was only a short time after that the Flakall Corporation would apply for a second patent to produce the human snack instead of the animal feed they had been producing. Eventually, they stopped animal feed production entirely, and changed their name to the Adams Corporation that focused solely on the yummy, scrumptious snack we’ve come to love.

The Adams Corporation though, isn’t the only company that stakes a claim to the tasty treat. The Elmer Candy Corporation in Louisiana claims that they were the first to produce the snack that they named Chee Wees. New York based Old London Foods also claims to have produced the Cheez Doodle in the 1950’s. But ultimately, Cheetos, made by the Frito Company became a household name in 1948.

Cheetos became widely popular because Frito’s founder Elmer Doolan worked out a deal with H.W. Lay to market the product. It became such a hit that the two successful companies merged in 1961 producing the company now known as Frito Lay. The snack now brings in some $970 million in sales each year. There are two main types of Cheetos these days, the crunchy version and the puff version. Which version is best is still up for debate!

The snack is so popular it even has its own mascot, Chester Cheetah. The cheesy cartoon character has been known to battle with Beyonce on Twitter and even had his own television show for a while called Yo! It’s the Chester Cheetah Show on the Fox Network.

Cheetos fans, if you’re not ashamed of your orange fingers, please share this story !