Hostess Frito-Lay and Pizza Hut have hooked up to offer snack lovers a pizza-flavored chip for the summer.

Samples bags of Doritos Pizza Cravers tortilla chips, which feature the Pizza Hut restaurant logo, and boast ‘the great taste of Pizza Hut’ are now being dropped off on the doorsteps of three million homes across Canada.

Not only are the chips being sampled, and sold in stores, but for the month of June, whenever customers order any item from Pizza Hut’s delivery service, they’ll get a bag of the Pizza Cravers free.

Doug McGillivray, director of marketing for Mississauga, Ont.-based Hostess Frito-Lay, says since both partner companies are ultimately owned by parent company PepsiCo, a tie-in was easy.

A cross-Canada marketing blitz is currently underway, including a tv spot where the chips are touted as ‘the loudest taste on earth.’ The spot, created by New York’s bbdo agency, with Toronto office input, will run until the end of the summer.

When the tv spots are gone, so are the chips, but McGillivray says they may be reintroduced later in the year.

Meanwhile, the company is hoping to capitalize on the upcoming release of the summer blockbuster Batman and Robin through cross-promotional point-of-sale offers. A campaign with the soft drink Mountain Dew, also a Pepsi brand, is currently in the works.

According to McGillivray, Hostess Frito-Lay hopes to attract youngsters and teens to the new taste but also anyone who is likely to try new flavors.

Competitor Small Fry Snack Foods, of Brampton, Ont., which makes Humpty-Dumpty, Extreme and Krunchers brands of potato chips released a pizza-flavored chip earlier this spring, marketed under the Humpty-Dumpty brand.

Tim Fallis, vice-president of Glavin and Associates, Small Fry’s sales promotion firm, says the two chip brands are entirely different in taste and seasoning, mainly because the Hostess chip uses corn as its base, while the Small Fry chip uses potat’es.

Fallis says the pizza flavor idea seems to work best as a short-term flavor ­ it runs for a few weeks in a blitz campaign and then it gets pulled.

According to ACNielsen, the snack food category under which chips fall is worth about $400 million in Canada.