During normal times, Taco Bell’s menu development team, like similar teams at other restaurant chains, would research new items by visiting other restaurants, traveling to different cities to explore their dining scenes, and meeting together in their research & development kitchens to experiment with the ingredients that their suppliers send to them.
During the novel coronavirus pandemic, none of that is possible.
Heather Mottershaw, the chain’s vice president of product development, said that overnight she’d lost her team’s most creative space, their Innovation Kitchen in Irvine, Calif.
New item testing had been paused once the pandemic struck, anyway, she said, partly because the chain wanted its operators to focus on the new realities rather than be distracted with new items, and also because their stressed-out customers weren’t looking for new items. They wanted “the comforts of Taco Bell that they all know and love,” Mottershaw said.
Besides, they weren’t sure exactly how to go about developing new items, so while testing was on pause, they figured it out.
Although many people with desk jobs find that the rabbit holes the Internet can lead them down are a distraction, Mottershaw said she and her team actually found that reading food blogs and restaurant reviews and looking at restaurants online was less distracting than being on the road or working in offices.
“Because we’re able to focus, and because we have more time, we’re able to find all of these insights and ideas and trends that we wouldn’t have found if we’d been in the office,” she said.
Unable to meet in the Innovation Kitchen, they did virtual tastings for which suppliers would send food packages to their homes, and then everyone would make them and taste them together online.
Once a few members of their team at a time could go back to their test kitchen, they developed a new process that they called a drive-thru tasting.
“Our marketing team or our developers who are not in the building are actually [driving] by the office and we’re bringing out the product that we developed, and then they’re taking it home and then tasting it.
“It’s more the real world of how our food really tastes, which is brilliant,” Mottershaw said.
She and her team also took the time to go through actual Taco Bell drive-thrus to see how their food worked in its usual setting, “and getting the real consumer experience,” she said.
“I feel like we’re more in touch with the food, and more deliberate and purposeful on what we’re creating for our consumers … because we don’t have the distractions of a busy kitchen or busy work environment. We’re actually finding bigger, richer ideas working this way,” she said.
Also, family members can be more honest than focus groups, she said.
The R&D team has started to resume focus groups to review new items while keeping those reviewers at a distance: They have them go through the drive-thru tasting, have them try the food at home and then they hold a video chat via Zoom.
Now Taco Bell is ready to roll out some new items, including a Crispy Taco — a freshly fried white corn shell lined with nacho cheese and cheddar cheese and filled with a choice of seasoned beef or black beans followed by the usual toppings of sour cream, lettuce, tomatoes and more cheese, served in a paper holster.
“As you bite into it you get this whole crispy, flinty, really yummy taco shell experience, but then you get all this ooey gooey cheese,” Mottershaw said.
And not to be left out of the ongoing “chicken wars,” Taco Bell’s team is also working on fried chicken, including a tortilla -coated strip they started developing before the pandemic.
The chicken breast strips have a buttermilk jalapeño ranch marinade and are coated in panko breadcrumbs and tortilla chips. Taco Bell is currently testing the strips as a soft taco in a 6-inch flour tortilla.
“It’s really delicious,” Mottershaw said.
Contact Bret Thorn at bret.thorn@informa.com
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