A history of snacks

America’s favorite salty and sweet snacks were invented by individuals, or dreamed up by marketers and corporations.

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Arch West, the inventor of Doritos, died Sept. 20 in Dallas. His family says that he will be buried with Doritos chips.

Family photo /

Frito-Lay employee Jesse Gonzales boxes bags of Doritos at the company's Irving, Tex., plant in 2002. The chips changed snack foods in America, introducing the tortilla chip to a market dominated by potato chips in the 1960s.

Donna McWilliam / AP

Pringles potato chips became popular in the 1970s. Procter & Gamble developed the chips to be perfectly packaged to avoid becoming stale or broken.

Marty Lederhandler / AP

Sue Reedquist shows some of the 400 prizes she selects for each day's production of Cracker Jacks at the company plant in Chicago in 1978. The mixture of sweetened popcorn and peanuts were packed into boxes in one part of the plant, and the prizes she selected were placed in each box by hand in another part of the plant. Cracker Jack has been sold since the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago.

Fred Jewell / AP

James Dewar prepares to unload a fresh shipment of Hostess Twinkies at his River Forest, Ill., home in 1980. Dewar invented the little finger-size, golden sponge cakes with a super-sweet cream filling in 1930. Dewar consumed them daily and handed them out for trick-or-treaters every Halloween.

/ AP

The Oreo was developed in 1912 by Nabisco. The cookie is now marketed under the slogan “Milk’s favorite cookie.”

Richard Drew / AP

Ray Verdon, then-president of Nabisco, holds packages of the new reduced-fat versions of two of the company's more popular products, Ritz crackers and Oreo cookies, at a New York news conference in 1994. Oreos were originally made with lard, but companies have made snacks more health-conscious.

Marty Lederhandler / AP

Jell-O was advertised in the Ladies' Home Journal in 1902 and quickly became a huge success. Today, there are more than 158 products sold under the Jell-O name.

Dan Loh / AP

Fresh potato chips sprinkled with hot seasoning pour from a chute to a machine that measures and bags them at the Herr's Foods plant in Nottingham, Pa., in 1996. The company, which began producing chips in 1946, began adding seasoning to its chips in 1958.

Jim Graham / AP

Orville Redenbacher brand popcorn had captured a third of the unpopped-popcorn market by the mid-1970s, and the eponymous owner often appeared in his product’s commercials. It remains one of the top popcorn brands in America.

Nati Harnik / AP

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