Antonia Hitchens goes inside Taco Bell’s food-innovation lab, where developers focus on the big questions, such as: How do you make a Cheez-It snack cracker big enough to be a tostada?
The innovation team at Taco Bell shares this zeal. Its work is intricate, the lab as much think tank as mad-scientist lair. Frito-Lay, which supplies the chain with taco shells, runs a research complex outside of Dallas that’s staffed by hundreds of chemists, psychologists, and technicians, who perform millions of dollars’ worth of research a year examining the crunch, mouthfeel, and aroma of each of its snack products.
There are twelve chef scientists on the innovation team, which is composed mainly of engineers and quality-assurance specialists. When I visited, researchers in lab coats were measuring ingredients on a scale, to insure that metrics remained consistent—each shred of cheese has to be a specific number of centimetres long.
At the time, no fast-food venders sold hard-shell tacos. Bell had a vision of crisp concave taco shells ready to be filled, but first he had to modify a fry basket to hold tortillas. He asked a chicken-coop salesman to make him one out of chicken wire. It could hold six folded tortillas at a time. Next, he had to find a way to keep the cooked shells upright in his taco assembly line. The solution was a V-shaped metal trough called a taco slide.
The first notable update of Bell’s crunchy-shell taco was the Doritos Locos Taco, in which the taco shell is a supersized Nacho Cheese Dorito. The idea originated in 2009, during a brainstorming summit between Taco Bell and Frito-Lay leadership at the latter’s research lab in Texas. The D.L.T. became a flash point in food engineering. “Once we had the learnings gained from developing the Doritos taco shell,” Lefebvre said, it paved the way for “collaborations like the Taco Bell Fritos Taco.” Anyone who has ever put potato chips on a sandwich can appreciate the appeal of a burrito with Cheetos inside, or a Cheez-It deployed as a raft for spicy meat.
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