The creator of Cool Ranch Doritos on the chips' little life lesson — and why Crystal Pepsi failed

Former Yum Brands $YUM CEO David Novak — inventor of the Cool Ranch Dorito — said the beloved chip flavor got its start during a grocery trip to a Texas supermarket in 1984. He and other executives needed to develop new products that could help the struggling Frito Lay business. At the time, their biggest moneymaker was Doritos.

“I took my team, and I said, ‘We’re just going to go up and down the grocery aisle and see what seems to be growing, or the big trends may be,’” Novak, who is also the founder of nonprofit foundation David Novak Leadership, said.

At one point, they got to salad dressings, Novak recalls, where they noticed a wall of ranch dressing ‘facing’ back at them. Facing in retail refers to certain products being placed at the front of shelves with their labels clearly visible.

Ranch was the fastest growing flavor of salad dressing at the time, giving Novak the idea to combine two popular items to make one hit product.

“It was produced by pairing things that aren’t obviously related,” Novak, who is also the author of How Leaders Learn: Master the Habits of the World’s Most Successful People, told Quartz in an interview.

“When I came back with the team, I said, ‘What if we developed a ranch flavored Dorito?,’” Novak said in reference to a term he has dubbed “pattern thinking” — a skill for exposing yourself to new ideas and experiences.

“We didn’t find this idea by going up and down the snack aisle, we went to a totally different category,” he said.

Not all of Novak’s ideas have landed. His Crystal Pepsi push was short-lived after it failed to resonate with consumers who wanted the drink to taste more like Pepsi. Executives pushed back on the idea, but Novak forged ahead.

“I was just letting my courage of convictions lead me blindly without really listening to potential objections,” he said. “If I had taken the product out, done more research, and talked to more consumers, they would have told me that it needed to taste more like Pepsi.”