Cheez Doodle Creator Morrie Yohai Dies at 90
Morrie Yohai, "an accomplished photographer, poet, professor and businessman," as well as one of the dudes that created Cheez Doodles, died of cancer at age 90. Today, we are all Chester Cheeto.
What is there to say about the man who invented the foodstuff of the 20th century? Yohai took over his father's snack food factory after serving as a pilot in WWII. It did not take long for him to make his impression:
"We were looking for another snack item," he said. "We were fooling around and found out that there was a machine that extruded cornmeal and it almost popped like popcorn."
Yohai and his partners thought of chopping the cornmeal product into pieces and coating it with cheese. "We wanted to make it as healthy as possible," he said, "so it was baked, not fried."
And, he said, the name Doodle occurred to him as they sat around a table tasting different kinds of cheese on the snacks.
This bears repeating: They wanted to make it as healthy as possible. Yohai sold the business to Borden, Inc., where he was given the greatest job title of all time, "group vice president in charge of snacks." His job, he told Newsday, involved "sitting around a conference table with other executives and choosing the toys for boxes of Cracker Jack."
