In 1932, a twenty-eight-year-old confectionery manager named Charles Elmer Doolin ordered a sandwich and a nickel bag of corn chips at a small San Antonio café. He liked the chips enough to track down the man who made them, a vendor named Gustavo Olguín who was getting ready to move back to Mexico and wanted to sell off the business. Doolin bought the recipe, a hand-cranked potato ricer, and nineteen retail accounts for one hundred dollars, borrowed from his mother, who reportedly pawned her wedding ring to help raise it.
That hundred dollars is where Fritos start, and it’s also where Dallas comes in, even though almost nobody associates the chip with this city anymore.
Doolin began making the chips in his mother Daisy’s San Antonio kitchen, with his father and brother Earl helping out, turning out about ten pounds a day and clearing roughly two dollars in profit after expenses. Production moved into the garage behind the family’s house on Roosevelt Avenue, then into the house next door once that filled up too. By 1933, a hammer press had pushed daily output up tenfold, and Doolin was ready to expand beyond San Antonio. That same year, he licensed a plant at 1405 N. Haskell Avenue in Dallas. The first attempt at running it failed within five months, so the Doolin family bought it outright and turned it into their second company-owned plant. A Tulsa location followed in 1934. Dallas, not San Antonio, became the company’s real center of gravity from there forward.
Doolin kept building. He developed his own hybrid corn variety and contracted Texas farmers to grow it exclusively for Frito production, treating the corn itself as a trade secret. He opened Tango Dairy Mart, an experimental fast food stand serving canned Mexican food, chili, tamales, and enchiladas, which is now considered one of the first Tex-Mex fast food concepts in the country and reportedly the first place in Dallas with a microwave.
He also bought Dixie Enterprises, the company behind the Pig Stand chain, the Oak Cliff drive-in that had already given Dallas the first curb service restaurant, Texas toast, and the onion ring. Two of the more foundational stories in Dallas food history, the corn chip and the drive-in, ended up under the same roof because of Doolin’s habit of buying anything that struck him as a good idea.
The company chartered as the Frito Company in September 1932, and by the time Doolin died in 1959, it had grown into a business with plants in eighteen cities, more than three thousand employees, and sales over fifty million dollars a year. In 1961 the Frito Company merged with H.W. Lay & Company to become Frito-Lay. Four years later, Frito-Lay merged with the Pepsi-Cola Company to form PepsiCo. The corn chip a young manager bought on a whim in a San Antonio café is now a subsidiary of one of the largest food and beverage companies on the planet, headquartered a short drive north in Plano. Doolin himself is buried at Restland Memorial Park, just off Greenville Avenue in Dallas.
There’s a second story tangled up in the first one, and it involves the dish most people actually associate with Fritos: chili spooned over a bed of chips and topped with cheese and onion. Texans have long credited Doolin’s mother Daisy with inventing what became known as Frito pie sometime in the 1930s or 40s, meant as a way to promote her son’s product. New Mexico tells a different story, crediting a Woolworth’s lunch counter employee in Santa Fe named Teresa Hernández with inventing the dish in the 1960s, ladling red chile over an opened bag of Fritos and serving it right there in the bag.
The rivalry between the two states over the dish has been going for decades and shows no sign of settling. What does exist on the record is a 1949 mention of “Fritos chili pie” served by the company to the Dallas Dietetic Association, more than a decade before Hernández’s version in Santa Fe, which at minimum puts a documented version of the dish in Dallas well before the Woolworth’s counter claim.
Whichever story gets the credit, both were building on the same hundred-dollar recipe bought off a struggling street vendor during the worst of the Great Depression. Fritos never caught on in Europe and are still only sold there on American military bases, but domestically Frito-Lay now produces something like 170 million pounds of the chip every year, made almost entirely from Texas corn. The next time a bag turns up at a tailgate, maybe next to a frozen margarita, another Dallas invention, it’s worth remembering that the whole thing started in a kitchen, moved through a garage, and became a real business only once it landed in Dallas.
