A Mesa woman spent two sleepless weeks in her garage turning nine bags of Doritos into a 7-foot Statue of Liberty, hoping the sculpture would win her family $250,000. Gabby Whiting, a 35-year-old mother of four, named her creation “Lady Chiperty,” covering a foam frame with roughly 1,500 individual chips in pursuit of Frito-Lay's national landmark-building contest.
As reported by Boston 25 News, Whiting entered Frito-Lay's Doritos Build It Bold Challenge, a contest celebrating America's 250th anniversary that required contestants to recreate a U.S. monument using flavored tortilla chips. The challenge, formally called Build Bold, launched in May 2026 and offered a $250,000 grand prize for edible landmark creations, according to DesignRush News. Entries were accepted through July 31, 2026, and judged on landmark accuracy, video presentation, and creativity, with a so-called “bold factor” accounting for half of the final score, per contest rules detailed by Maribel Aber on Facebook. The rules strictly prohibited artificial intelligence and any chips not made by Doritos.
Whiting first considered the Lincoln Memorial for her project, but the station's report notes that landmark was ineligible under the contest's rules. She settled on the Statue of Liberty instead, chronicling the entire build on social media as she worked. She started carving the foam base on July 17, giving herself just two weeks to finish before the deadline.
Nine Bags, One Garage, No Sleep
The sculpture came together in layers. Whiting stacked 7 feet of foam to form the statue's body before covering it in custom Dorito-colored paint, which she matched at a local Home Depot. She then applied the chips themselves: four bags of Cool Ranch Doritos covered Lady Liberty's body, five bags of Nacho Cheese Doritos covered the base, and a handful of Sriracha Doritos formed the torch's flame, according to the same account. In total, Whiting used nine bags of chips and spent approximately $528 on chips, foam, glue sticks, and accessories.
The physical Statue of Liberty stands 151 feet and 1 inch tall from base to torch, according to the National Park Service, making Whiting's 7-foot chip-covered version roughly a 1:21 scale replica of the copper original, which French sculptor Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi designed and which was dedicated in 1886. Whiting had no sleep during the final 48 hours before the contest deadline, per the Boston 25 News account, relying on her husband for support throughout the project.
Balancing a Newborn, a Business, and a Bold Build
Whiting wasn't working with a lot of spare time to begin with. She had given birth to her fourth son just four months before entering the contest, and she also runs an at-home teeth-whitening business called Sunkist Smiles, according to WSOC-TV. She said she needed regular breaks during the build to cool down, breastfeed, and simply be a mother, balancing sculpting sessions late into the night around her newborn's schedule.
Whiting, who also works as a content creator, said she loves competitions and that the $250,000 prize would be life-changing for her family. She even joked that Doritos taste exactly how her house smells these days, a testament to just how thoroughly the project took over her garage and her kitchen.
Doritos supported contest entrants with an online Workbench portal offering structural tutorials for stacking and curving chips, along with a digital calculator to estimate how many bags a given build would require, per DesignRush News. Frito-Lay also ran a daily summer sweepstakes alongside the main contest, giving away branded coolers, Bluetooth speakers, beach towels, and gift cards. As part of the same 250th-anniversary push, the company released a limited-edition Ultimate Garlic Parm flavor in star-adorned bags as its official commemorative chip, according to Trend Hunter.
A Bigger Corporate Push Around America's 250th
The Doritos contest is one piece of a much larger marketing wave tied to the Semiquincentennial, joining campaigns like Kraft Heinz's United Tastes of America and Coca-Cola's own anniversary activations, DesignRush News reports. A national consumer survey published in June 2026 found that nearly 80 percent of American adults identify as snack people, with 82 percent saying they'd swap dinner for snacks and the average American snacking four times a day, according to Bakery and Snacks, a trend brands have leaned into with interactive social campaigns like this one.
Mesa, where Whiting lives, is Arizona's third-largest city with an estimated population of 513,656 as of July 2025, sitting about 16 miles east of Phoenix in Maricopa County, per Every City in the USA. As of now, Doritos is in the process of naming contest winners, according to people familiar with the process, leaving Whiting and her family waiting to find out whether Lady Chiperty's torch-to-toe transformation was bold enough to take home the quarter-million-dollar prize.
