This is a Crunchwrap Supreme.
It wasn’t too hard for my writer, Ben, to get his hands on one—he just walked down
the block, selected it on a touch screen, realized that Taco Bell also serves liquor,
started day drinking, forgot why he was filming or where he lived, and then sat down in the
street and ate it, all in the span of about 15 minutes.
But as simple and convenient as the Crunchwrap might seem, its development was anything but—it
took 13 years and some shockingly precise science to develop, but as far as Taco Bell
menu items go, it’s really no exception; like most multinational fast food chains,
every item on the Taco Bell menu is a carefully-engineered piece of technology.
It takes psychologists, engineers, marketers, and professional taste-testers to get something
like the Crunchwrap right, and today, we’re gonna talk about how they do it.
For Taco Bell, much of that process happens here: their Innovation Kitchen in Irvine,
California.
The kitchen is staffed by 12 chef scientists, plus an additional team of engineers and quality-assurance
specialists, all of whom are working around the clock to make beans more exciting.
Their tireless efforts produce about 8 to 10 new Taco Bell menu items per year, but
those are selected from a group of 70 or so items that make it to testing, and those,
in turn, are selected from a group of 4,000 to 5,000 fleshed-out concepts.
So, let’s start there, at the very beginning of the design process: how does a divine human
being, a child of God, bring themselves to conceptualize Mexican Pizza?
Well, it might seem like they’re just throwing darts at the hedonistic dart board, but the
psychology behind Taco Bell’s menu is actually shockingly rigid.
In order to make it past this first phase, an idea must—to a certain degree—fulfill
three criteria.
The first is relevance: this is meant both in the sense that it’s culturally relevant
and discussion-worthy, but also functionally relevant; each menu item has something that
Taco Bell calls Category-Use Occasions, which are basically the specific set of circumstances
that a person would be in where that menu item would be the solution.
So, just to use the Crunchwrap as an example, it’s designed, unlike a normal taco or tostada,
to be eaten with one hand: a circumstance you would find yourself in if you were driving,
or were already eating a Crunchwrap with your other hand.
The second bullet point is ease: there should be as little friction as possible in getting
the item out the door, both for the consumer and the manufacturer.
Something as simple as adding too much cilantro to a menu item for a chain as big as Taco
Bell means running the risk of draining the supply chain of cilantro, and then people
won’t have access to the hot new Mountain Dew Cilantro Blast.
The Crunchwrap is essentially just a repackaging of often-used Taco Bell ingredients, so it
was never going to be scarce or hard to access.
And the last criteria is distinctiveness: the item has to stand out in people’s minds,
but it can’t stand out too much—Taco Bell’s chief design principle is that you can change
the taste or the form of a traditional food, but not both.
The Crunchwrap, naturally, is an innovation in form, but not in taste.
Of course, most items don’t make it past this first phase, and even if they do, they
usually require dozens of iterations—this is what the innovation kitchen’s Sensory
Panel is for.
Taco Bell trains an elite group of professional tasters who help dial in specific parameters;
the ideal bite force for a chip, for example, is four pounds per square inch.
To get the best possible mouthfeel from a taco, exactly half of its calories should
be from fat.
And in the case of the Doritos Locos Taco, the first handful of its 40 different iterations
struggled to get out of this phase because of their structural integrity: a chip should
break, but a shell should not, and the original triangular design of the DLT shell made it
too easy to break—we told Ben to test this, but he burned the shell the first time, and
then the shell burned him the second time, so our other writer Amy came over and made
him one, and sure enough, yeah, it breaks pretty easily.
Now, once a concept makes it out of the innovation kitchen, that doesn’t mean it gets a coveted
spot on the Taco Bell menu—first, it’ll be rolled out for a limited time in one of
Taco Bell’s test markets.
Taco Bell has tested items in—among other cities—Sacramento, Irvine, Milwaukee, Dayton,
Knoxville, Birmingham, and Minneapolis.
Choosing a city usually depends on the sorts of demographics they want data from; the Doritos
Locos Taco was first rolled out not in a major city like New York or LA, but in Toledo, Ohio.
Of course the big city sickos would be all over something like that, but it remained
to be seen whether the blue-collar manufacturing demographic of a city like Toledo was ready
to truly Live Mas.
Most products end up failing to pass this hurdle, which is why you see such short-lived
lives for things like the French Toast Chalupa, the Cheetos Burrito, and the Croissant Taco.
We didn’t ask him to, but Ben heard the phrase “croissant taco” and immediately
put it to the test, and cannot believe that Ohio ruined this for the rest of us.
And that brings us back to the Crunchwrap Supreme—only after years of carefully calibrating
ingredient distribution to a neat 6.25 ounces, diagramming the perfect 6-inch hexagonal fold,
innovating a heat-sealing solution to stop it from popping open, and testing it in a
limited capacity in 2005 did the Crunchwrap earn a permanent spot in the Taco Bell roster.
So the next time you thank science for penicillin, clean water, or the nuclear bomb, throw in
a good word for the Crunchwrap, too.
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