Newsday
Sylvia Carter
January 12, 2005


Doodles make him a big Cheez

Morrie Yohai's wife, Phyllis, calls their home on Long Island Sound in Kings Point "the house that Cheez Doodles bought."

Morrie Yohai, 84, a modest fellow who goes to Torah study once a week, tries to shush her when she says that.

It is just Phyllis Yohai's way of announcing that she is proud that her husband helped invent Doodles. It is her way of saying that she is grateful for an expansive waterfront view that encompasses four bridges: the Throg's Neck, the Whitestone, the Triboro and a bit of the George Washington.

The cashiers at Food Emporium call her "Ms. Cheez Doodle."

Her husband the snackmeister speaks humbly of having merely "developed" Cheez Doodles. Even he will confess, however, to having thought to call them Doodles.

Yohai includes his business partners, scrupulously using the pronoun "we," when he tells the Cheez Doodle saga.

Becoming as modesty is, in this case it may be unwarranted. There are perhaps millions of people in the world who consider Cheez Doodles the ideal snack food. People in search of healthful food do not generally gorge themselves on Doodles (well, perhaps in secret they do), but this is one snack that since its debut in the 1950s has always been baked, not fried. An argument could even be made that because the snacks are "puffed," as the bag says, they consist in large part of air. Therefore, how bad could they be?

Thousands of fans incessantly post love letters to the snack on the Internet.

"Cheez Doodles are the most perfect food ever invented. Seriously." That's what one devotee wrote. Another, Mark Allen, admitted that he is up to a bag a day and is having a hard time facing up to his addiction.

"When I eat at fancy restaurants," Allen writes, "I'm almost disappointed when they bring me a big, gleaming white plate with a $35 steak on it.... I almost wish the chef would open a bag of Cheez Doodles and pile them onto my plate and the crisply dressed waiter would sashay it out to my table and place it in front of me and everyone would go, 'Aaahhh! Magnificent!'"

Doodles have inspired works of art, if you can call them that, including a cocktail party diorama made entirely of the cheesy tidbits, and a woman immersed in a bathtub filled with them.

I am helpless in the thrall of Doodles. I just keep eating until the available supply is gone. One recent afternoon, Morrie and Phyllis Yohai and I spilled the more-or-less original puffed Doodles and the improved-upon (to my mind) crunchy ones, more slender in diameter, out onto a Formica table so we could compare them.

We found that comparison required many, many samples, and lots of licking of fingers to scarf up every last bit of cheese. Even Morrie Yohai, who had a quadruple bypass last year, ate heartily.

Yohai told me that they were discovered, invented, developed or whatever word you choose to use, at the Old London Melba Toast factory in the Bronx, which also made the Cheese Waffie (now called Waffle), popcorn, caramel popcorn and other snacks. "We were looking for another snack item," he said. "We were fooling around and found out that there was a machine that extruded cornmeal [in a long string] and it almost popped like popcorn."

Yohai and his partners thought of chopping the stuff into pieces the size of a child's finger and coating it with cheese. "We wanted to make it as healthy as possible, so it was baked, not fried."

One day, as they sat around a table tasting different kinds of cheese on the snacks, the name Doodle occurred to him. "They looked more like a doodle," he said, back when they were thin.

Cheez Doodles "really took off," he said. The demand for the cheesy morsels was so great in Sweden that the Old London Co., which still exists, shipped half a boatload at a special rate. When the Yohais were on their way to Stockholm for a chip convention, they stopped off in Copenhagen, where they saw a store with an entire display window filled with Cheez Doodles.

Wise, which is part of Borden, now manufactures Doodles. Yohai went on to become group vice president in charge of snacks for Borden, which also made Cracker Jack and Drake's Cakes. His duties included sitting around a conference table with other high-ranking executives and choosing the toys for boxes of Cracker Jack.

After leaving the company, Yohai taught marketing at the New York Institute of Technology and became associate dean of the school of management. "The one thing that would get the students' attention was Cheez Doodles," he said.

Once, Yohai accompanied his wife to the supermarket. "Is this Mr. Cheez Doodles?" the cashier asked.