Cheetos Chile Y Limón

My bag of Chile Y Limón Cheetos doesn't actually look like the bag above - it's green and features Chester in the middle of a wrestling ring with an apparently nervous lime on one side and a pepper in a luchador mask on the other. Whatever.

Chile Y Limón Cheetos certainly deliver what the name promises - the snacks have a dark red color and a taste that combines a smoky, mildly spicy pepper flavor with a kick of lime, aided by the inclusion in the ingredients of "lime juice solids." However, there is a point at which the name no longer makes sense - and that's when it gets to "Cheetos."

Simply put, there is no cheese in Chile Y Limón Cheetos. Not even the barest hint of it. I scanned the ingredients twice to make sure I wasn't missing anything; nope. It's just not there. It's not like cheese is a snack food requirement, I guess, but your snack is named Cheetos! The slogan used to be "the cheese that goes crunch!" Would it have been that difficult to keep a slight underlying cheese flavor? It works perfectly well with the Flamin' Hot variety. And I think it would have made these snacks better. They're all right, but they seem to lack character somehow - there's a chile taste that hits first, followed by the lime taking over, and then the whole thing fades to a mild burn at the back of the mouth... and while all this is okay, I feel like there should be something else in there, right under the initial chile taste, preventing the lime from completely overwhelming everything until after I've swallowed. I think it would also make the aftertaste a little less starchy to have some cheese in there; right now, that's what we get, and while it's not unpleasant, I'd rather be tasting something else at that point if at all possible.

Really, these cover little ground that the Flamin' Hot Limón Cheetos don't - yeah, they're less spicy, which is fine if you're somebody's grandmother, but if you're eating Cheetos at all you ought to be able to handle a little spice on top of that. If you really want the Limón experience with a kick, that's where I'd go. It's a bigger kick, but it's much more satisfying, too.