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By Matthew Rees

Food and Health Fact #192:

Taco Hell

I post on Twitter semi-regularly. Find me at @foodhealthfacts The full catalog of my previous posts, articles, and commentaries can be found on the Food and Health Facts website

“Lois Carson always wanted to find a new way to fold a tortilla.”

That’s the titilating start to a delicious article published last week in The New Yorker. The author, Antonia Hitchens, focuses on Taco Bell and its plethora of product innovations. Along the way, she illuminates, in exquisite detail, how a highly successful fast-food company – it serves 42 million people per week – seeks to entice the American consumer.

Here is Ms. Hitchens describing Taco Bell’s innovation team:

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. A forty-thousand-dollar steel device that mimics a chewing mouth tests such factors as the perfect breaking point of a chip. (People apparently like a chip that snaps with about four pounds of pressure per square inch.) . . .  

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 (chopped tomatoes, ribbons of lettuce) on a scale, to insure that metrics remained consistent—each shred of cheese has to be a specific number of centimetres long. 

One of the age-old tricks used by food and beverage companies is continually releasing new products (or new twists on old products), which then becomes the basis for new marketing campaigns. How many new products? About 15,000 in any given given year.

Taco Bell is no different: it releases a new product, on average, nearly every month. The company’s innovation scientists test about 70 products but consider thousands. Where do the ideas come from? Taco Bell’s chief food officer, writes Ms. Hitchens, “regularly takes groups of employees on food-immersion trips to cities around the world, where they eat for four days.”

Taco Bell is similar to virtually all food and beverage companies in one respect: its devotion to luring in consumers and trying to get them to stay. But it’s rare to read about it in this level of detail. (A longer treatment can be found in Michael Moss’s Salt, Sugar, Fat, which is a must read to understand how food companies strive to hook consumers.)

Suffice to say, nowhere in the article is there any evidence that Taco Bell is innovating to make its products healthier. Predictably, most of the menu offerings – like the “Nachos BellGrande” and the “Beefy 5-Layer Burrito” – are bursting with calories, sodium, and saturated fat. And the ingredients that make up even seemingly simple products are something only a chemist could appreciate. Consider what’s found in a Taco Bell flour tortilla:

Bleached enriched wheat flour, malted barley flour, water, shortening (interesterified soybean oil, hydrogenated soybean oil, hydrogenated cottonseed oil), contains 2% or less of salt, leavening (baking soda, sodium acid pyrophosphate, yeast [yeast, sorbitan monostearate, ascorbic acid]), sugar, dough conditioners (mono- and diglycerides, fumaric acid, sorbic acid, enzymes, wheat starch, calcium carbonate, sodium metabisulfite, cellulose, corn starch, dicalcium phosphate, with tocopherols, ascorbic acid and citric acid [added as antioxidants]), calcium propionate (P), molasses.

Last year, Taco Bell launched a promotion that enabled consumers to purchase a taco every day for a month, for just $10. But what happens if you eat Taco Bell every day?

An article published by Eat This, Not That! explored this question a few years ago. It said such a diet would contribute to depression, continued feelings of hunger, cognitive impairment, higher likelihood of stroke, and increased risk of heart disease.

To distract its customers from the health effects of its products, Taco Bell depends on innovative marketing, which includes a Taco Bell-themed wedding chapel (in Las Vegas, of course), a Taco Bell hotel, and a TikTok channel with 2.6 million followers. (The channel featured a 15-minute Taco Bell-themed musical featuring Dolly Parton and Doja Cat last year.) The company’s branding director told Ms. Hitchens that the company’s mission is to “build content for cultural rebels.” There is even an independent literary magazine – Taco Bell Quarterly – focused on the company’s products and culture.

Taco Bell is just one of the many food brands selling products that contribute to Americans’ high rates of disease, disability, and death. PepsiCo – the world’s largest food company – is another and an article in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal noted that while the company has spent many years trying to “move past its junk-food roots,” now it’s moving in other direction. There’s renewed focus on Pepsi, Doritos, and Lay’s potato chips, coupled with new offerings connected to Mountain Dew and Gatorade. The company used to disclose -- but no longer does -- how much of its net revenue came from products it defined as nutritious. (In 2018, it was just 27 percent.)

As for Lois Carson, whose folding innovation led to Taco Bell’s “Crunchwrap Supreme” (its best-selling product ever), she was laid off by the company in 2008. But what did she eat for lunch when working at the company? Not her signature creation, thank you. She wisely opted for fruit and yogurt or a peanut-butter sandwich.