"It’s the logical endgame of American abundance and choice."

April 21, 2023 12:28 PM

Taco Bell's Innovation Kitchen, the front line in the stunt food wars (archive.is)
posted by box (26 comments total)

Taco Bell missed out when they passed on the O'Taco: cabbage, mashed potatoes, corned beef, and Guinness on a flour burrito shell.
posted by Servo5678 at 12:36 PM on April 21, 2023 [2 favorites]

How did the chain outdo Burger King’s Bacon Sundae, Pizza Hut’s hot-dog-stuffed crust, Cinnabon’s Pizzabon, and KFC’s fried-chicken-flavored nail polish?

Jesus, talk about low fucking bars.
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 1:01 PM on April 21, 2023 [13 favorites]

It's just so American: stunt architecture, stunt movies, stunt presidents...
posted by bitslayer at 1:03 PM on April 21, 2023 [2 favorites]

"... Pisciotti and an assistant deftly swiveled the four-foot long sour cream gun into place, adding a layer of the popular goop between two fried, helpfully more stable slabs of crusted sour cream. The resultant concoction, dubbed a 'Threefer' in-house only for now, was scheduled for test markets in Austin the following week."

gonna pass on that one
posted by user92371 at 1:32 PM on April 21, 2023

Makes sense. Everyone knows that by 2032, all restaurants will be Taco Bell.

Guess I'll have to figure out the three seashells before then.
posted by fimbulvetr at 1:44 PM on April 21, 2023 [9 favorites]

It is really grim that we have the science to defeat our own satiety and better impulses this way. It's not even that this stuff is, like, a really good taco truck taco, or even from-scratch state fair stunt food, it's just horrible ultra-processed industrial food. It's sort of the cosmic horror of food - there is no order or meaning in the universe, there is no way to attune yourself to what is true or good, there's just a series of efforts to trick you into eating weird chemical cheese dust....and you fall for them every time.

Worth noting: the inventor of the Crunchwrap Supreme was fired in 2008. She invented the Crunchwrap Supreme, a Taco Bell item so famous that even I have heard of it, a Taco Bell item that is basically a meme, and she was fired, probably due to agism since she must have been in her late fifties.
posted by Frowner at 1:53 PM on April 21, 2023 [16 favorites]

Like, you don't even get rewarded for tricking people into eating the chemical cheese dust, you just get disposed of.
posted by Frowner at 1:54 PM on April 21, 2023 [6 favorites]

Regret is the core of human freedom... let Taco Bell be one of those regrets.
posted by jackbishop at 2:06 PM on April 21, 2023 [5 favorites]

I think Taco Bell innovator would be really fun. Like they have their set of ingredients, and they get to put them into whatever combinations they can imagine. McDonalds will add new stuff (then make it as cheap as possible), but Taco Bell? No, their purchasing processes are set, and will not be meddled with. Like being a Taco Bell mathematician or something.

The only place that would be more fun would be In N Out, with their even more limited set of ingredients, making up secret menu stuff.
posted by The_Vegetables at 2:13 PM on April 21, 2023 [1 favorite]

There is nothing to invent. You (the customer) just tell the person what you want. Their entire customer base are the In-N-Out secret menu people.
posted by Back At It Again At Krispy Kreme at 2:26 PM on April 21, 2023 [1 favorite]

I dropped back onto dating apps a couple months back and matched with a guy who was an R&D chef and exchanged just a couple messages. I said I thought food R&D was one of the things that made me feel most patriotically American, and specifically referenced the brave scientists at Taco Bell who figured out how to put Doritos in a burrito without them getting soggy.

He replied saying "wow they put doridos [sic] in a burrito?"

I did not message him back.
posted by phunniemee at 2:39 PM on April 21, 2023 [15 favorites]

I had taco bell for the first time in 15 years at lunch with kattullus a couple of weeks ago - I didn't even realize the Crunchwrap I ordered (because it looked like it wouldn't mess up my hands) was so well designed and had such a long product development process. I am sad Carson got laid off and never got her name on the patent.
posted by infini at 2:52 PM on April 21, 2023

> I think Taco Bell innovator would be really fun.

"A dairy scientist named Mike Ciresi had worked on the melted-cheese burrito every day for months."

I think your definition of fun is different than mine.
posted by jeremias at 2:57 PM on April 21, 2023 [1 favorite]

It's sort of the cosmic horror of food - there is no order or meaning in the universe, there is no way to attune yourself to what is true or good, there's just a series of efforts to trick you into eating weird chemical cheese dust....and you fall for them every time.

Reading this I can't help but think of my poor pit beagle from years ago. He was the sweetest dog I'd ever known. But then he found a white-cheddar cheese corn puff and... changed. Something awoke inside his limbic system, an ineluctable clockwork of chemistry that made him an unstoppable puffcorn-seeking force. His eyes opened wide and he sniffed everywhere in the house looking for MORE. A few minutes later, he became his normal self again. But we made sure in the future to not drop any stray puffs lest we awaken the puffcorn demon once more.
posted by a snickering nuthatch at 2:59 PM on April 21, 2023 [18 favorites]

There's a technology angle to this that's kind of missing from the article. Those Crunchwrap Supremes are held together with a panini press (as the article mentions), but you just don't go out to Walmart and buy one.

You've got to find a manufacturer that makes something close to what you need, or can customize it, and oh yeah we're rolling out in 6 months and can we have 1,000 of them please? And we'll need 10,000 more over the next two years if all goes well. Buy the materials now but we may drop the whole thing later on and leave you on the hook.

In some cases you're dealing with franchisees that all of a sudden get told by Corporate that a new menu item is coming and oh yeah you need to buy this $7,500 gadget to make the thing and here are the two approved vendors. So there goes your margin for the next month or two and please have it ready to go by spring. THAT goes over really well.
posted by JoeZydeco at 3:03 PM on April 21, 2023 [4 favorites]

I don't remember if I've said this here before, but I feel like Taco Bell is what fine dining would look like if it was invented by a race of aliens who only experience texture. Like, uniform meatgunk aroma, uniform beefycheez flavor, seventy-six different finely nuanced permutations of crunch, squish, chew, and stretch.

I feel vindicated.
posted by nebulawindphone at 3:19 PM on April 21, 2023 [17 favorites]

This clip from the wire always seems appropriate.

Which is more or less the story of the McRib
posted by lkc at 3:49 PM on April 21, 2023 [1 favorite]

it's just horrible ultra-processed industrial food. It's sort of the cosmic horror of food - there is no order or meaning in the universe, there is no way to attune yourself to what is true or good, there's just a series of efforts to trick you into eating weird chemical cheese dust....and you fall for them every time.

Well, that's just, like, your opinion, man.
posted by tclark at 4:03 PM on April 21, 2023 [7 favorites]

... Pisciotti and an assistant deftly swiveled the four-foot long sour cream gun into place,...
I think I'd like one of those, for... home defense, I guess.
posted by MtDewd at 4:56 PM on April 21, 2023 [5 favorites]

There is something very unappetising about this whole process.

Taco Bell have only gingerly started to expand into my country, which is a problem for them because they're about ten years too late; local chains that imitated Chipotle sprang up and basically took the market, so now Taco Bell is both bad (because they cook nothing in-store, as the article admits, and they're being compared to chains that do) and also not that cheap (because we have labour laws).
posted by Merus at 7:25 PM on April 21, 2023 [5 favorites]

Related: Taco Bell's Five Ingredients Combined in Totally New Way
posted by mmoncur at 7:27 PM on April 21, 2023 [1 favorite]

That onion article is mentioned within this article.
posted by tiny frying pan at 5:47 AM on April 22, 2023 [2 favorites]

I don't remember if I've said this here before, but I feel like Taco Bell is what fine dining would look like if it was invented by a race of aliens who only experience texture. Like, uniform meatgunk aroma, uniform beefycheez flavor, seventy-six different finely nuanced permutations of crunch, squish, chew, and stretch.

I feel vindicated

I eat at Taco Bell regularly; my app shows seven times this year plus a couple breakfast I don't order through the app, and this is definitely the appeal for me. It's the crunch wrap (the breakfast one is fantastic) or some kind of soft burrito with crunchy things inside. That's all I ever want. Some kind of soft thing, with sour cream ideally, combined with some kind of crunchy thing.
posted by Bulgaroktonos at 6:27 AM on April 22, 2023 [3 favorites]

In the book, he endorses a popular theory—that, as American drivers switched to automatic transmissions, the nation collectively gained weight because it became easy to hold a snack in the hand that was formerly reserved for the gearshift.

Is this really a popular theory? It sounds so stupid. Snacking while driving (whether me or someone else driving) in my experience is not so common as to seem like it could be statistically relevant. I can say with certainty, though, that 100% of the time that I'm driving I'm neither walking nor biking. Might want to look there for possible weight gain explanations.
posted by pinothefrog at 9:25 AM on April 22, 2023

You might as well add cupholders to that theory.
posted by JoeZydeco at 12:03 PM on April 22, 2023 [1 favorite]

you can snack while driving a stick, or so I have heard...
posted by supermedusa at 12:05 PM on April 22, 2023