It’s midday on a Friday and I’m in Orange County, California, sitting around a table with four women gabbing about food—and no one is eating except me. Typical, I think. But this is no sidewalk bistro in Laguna Beach, and these are not your standard ladies who lunch. We’re at a semicircular counter in a windowless room in a white nondescript office park that’s home to one of America’s largest fast food giants. And my lunch mates are among the masterminds of one of the most successful fast food products in history: the Doritos Locos Taco.
The table is the centerpiece of the “innovation forum” at Taco Bell headquarters, a pseudo classroom with a kitchen used to simulate a restaurant. Like the rest of the building, this room has the vibe of a Virgin America plane. Bright menu panels line the back wall, while two amphitheater-style rows of purple-cushioned chairs face large television screens above the table and demo kitchen. A cross between a cooking-show set and the assembly area behind a stadium food stand, the squeaky-clean, stainless steel kitchen is stocked with heaters and timers, plastic drawers of taco shells, and stacks of to-go containers. These food scientists and marketing gurus aren’t eating because they’re studying me—one of the very first outsiders to bite into what will soon become the third flavor of the Doritos Locos Taco, “Fiery DLT.”
When the original nacho cheese DLT debuted in March 2012, its sales figures were as eye-popping as its neon orange shell. It quickly became the company’s most popular menu item of all time, hitting the 100 million mark in an unprecedented 10 weeks. (Granted, times were different, but it took McDonald’s 10 years to sell its 100 millionth burger during the 1950s.) Before the taco reached its six-month birthday, Americans had collectively purchased two DLTs for every three people. To date, more than 600 million have been sold, at a rate of a million per day in 2012. By now you may even know it as the taco that might “save America,” as The Daily Beast’s Daniel Gross put it, with the 15,000 jobs the crossbreed created to handle the growth in Taco Bell business.
In the process, the DLT has emerged as the standard-bearer for a whole platoon of laughably, unabashedly decadent new products that one might call “stunt foods.” Or “shock and awe” foods, to borrow from Barb Stuckey, food industry expert at Mattson and the author of Taste: Surprising Stories and Science About Why Food Tastes Good. Stunt foods share some salient characteristics: Many are the result of cobranding—merging two familiar brands—and several blur the lines between meal categories, like the hamburger-looking ice cream sandwich at Carl’s Jr., which mixes dinner mentality with dessert reality. Above all, what’s unique about the DLT and its brethren is their flagrance. They celebrate their indulgence, rather than hide it.
Last year, as the DLT was taking America by storm, Burger King took a bacon sundae nationwide; Baskin-Robbins deconstructed an ice cream cone into “nachos”; Cinnabon applied its trademark spiral to a personal pizza; Pizza Hut started stuffing its crusts with hot dogs in the UK and wreathing its pizzas with mini cheeseburgers in the Middle East. This year brought Chili Cheese Fry Burritos at Del Taco, Pop-Tart ice cream sandwiches at Carl’s Jr., and a bacon-egg doughnut sandwich at Dunkin’ Donuts.
From the consumer’s perspective, it’s hard not to see this as a backlash against all the healthy-food agitprop, from the first lady’s office down to the local corner store. “People are so sick of hearing about what healthy foods you should be eating and how we are a nation of obese people,” says Stuckey. “When one of these chains comes out of left field and introduces something so shockingly indulgent, it’s like a release from the onslaught of fear-mongering about our health.” Megan LoDolce, a food marketing researcher at the Yale Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity, says marketers could be using these new food species to appeal to a sort of rebellion, conscious or subconscious, against all the “perceived paternalism” common in today’s discourse around eating. And certainly the rhetoric of the fast food companies lends some credence to this view: One promo for the DLT, for example, simply said in big block letters, “GIVE IN.”
Really, though, the stunt-food trend may be less about a rejectionist sentiment than it is about the confluence of two forces within the fast food industry. The first is an imperative for research-intensive product development. Product development is certainly nothing new, but now there is heightened pressure to satisfy customers’ desire for novelty. Paired with stiff competition from fast casual restaurants (like Chipotle), fast food chains that have been around for decades may start to look, well, like they have been around for decades. If you don’t innovate, you fold, says Harry Balzer, chief industry analyst and vice president of market-research firm The NPD Group. According to NPD, compared with menus of the 1990s there are now twice as many distinct fast food items in the US.
The second force, meanwhile, is the rise of social media, which has made fast food execs question the power of traditional advertising and hunger for the free attention reaped when a product goes viral. Put those two forces together and the incentives are clear. Start with an idea that’s too absurd to ignore—then use serious science to bring it to life.
The granddaddy of the stunt-foods movement is the KFC Double Down: a “bunless” bacon and jack sandwich that substitutes fried chicken fillets for slices of bread. (In its April 2010 press release, the chicken chain bragged it would be donating “unneeded” sandwich buns to food banks.) Between the blogosphere brouhaha and YouTube videos—in which thousands of people watched other people go to test-market KFCs and try the sandwich, bragging, “Bet you wish you lived here!”—the Double Down earned more buzz during testing than any other menu item in the company’s history. So much that KFC announced the nationwide arrival of the product before it was even available. In the press release, Javier Benito, executive vice president of marketing and food innovation, explained the unusual move: “We want fans to have time to arrange their schedules in advance for a visit to KFC to try this legendary sandwich.”
In launching and sustaining the DLT craze, Taco Bell has been as maniacally active on social media as the teens it targets. Once the nacho cheese dust had settled from the debut of the original DLT—which included a campaign whereby tweeters of hashtag #DoritosLocosTacos could be featured on digital billboards in Times Square and on Sunset Boulevard—customers began asking for Cool Ranch, and Taco Bell started teasing its next flavor online. In January it posted an image to Facebook of a taco and a bag of Cool Ranch Doritos with the caption “anything could happen in 2013.” Among the company’s most liked Facebook posts ever, it boasts over 133,000 likes. Taco Bell even created “taco speakeasies” in New York, Dallas, and Los Angeles, where fans could use social media to “unlock” the locations of places to try the new taco. During testing for Taco Bell’s latest shock-worthy star, the waffle taco, one Instagram photo snowballed into 4 million social media impressions—for a product still confined to five test restaurants.
In a few cases, the spark for a stunt-food product actually came from consumers through social media. Burger King’s bacon sundae, for example, emerged when the chain’s innovation team was scanning Pinterest and other social platforms to analyze how consumers were using bacon in creative ways. Del Taco launched its Chili Cheese Fry Burrito after it realized that customers were making the concoction themselves in the restaurant; at least one franchise reported that customers were asking the counter staff to make it for them special. (Ironically, says Mike Salem, senior director of research and development at Del Taco, this made the new burrito more challenging to make, since food scientists had to “emulate the product as the consumer had created it in their minds.”)
Once an idea has been hatched, bringing it to the table in real life can involve as many scientists as a government task force. Fast food chains’ R&D rosters include degrees like culinary science and nutrition but also chemistry and industrial, packaging, and mechanical engineering. Over countless iterations, food technicians work in test kitchens alongside trained chefs, with input from marketers and quality assurance specialists. There are focus groups and prototypes, operations tests and market tests.
The challenges are subtle but nearly endless. Sogginess. Dryness. Breakage. Uneven distribution of ingredients. And any fast food item needs a system in place to keep the thing hot—and tasting fresh—until the customer gets it home. Altogether, months and even years can pass between conception of an idea and birth of a product.
Take that Chili Cheese Fry Burrito. The biggest problem was the ratio of dry and wet ingredients. That is, they had to merge wet chili with dry starches—crinkle-cut fries and a tortilla—without producing either a swampy mess or a chalky log. Plus, as with all fast food, there’s the issue of portability—how would the product hold up in transit? So they tested the burrito at five-minute intervals. Salem explained, “I’ve got to guarantee the product is as hot and fresh and just as flavorful 40 minutes after I’ve prepared it, just as it is five minutes after I’ve prepared it.”
At its headquarters in Lake Forest, California, Del Taco has a sensory lab where it conducts preference tests—asking consumers to rate different items that appear in chutes—and matching tests. During the latter, expert tasters sit in booths with red and blue lighting (which eliminates preferences triggered by visual cues) and try to detect differences between versions of a product.
When El Pollo Loco was testing its Chocolate Nachos, the main challenge was color. “We wanted to make sure that your head would register chocolate before you tasted it,” said Heather Gardea, vice president of research and development. They insisted that the chocolate-flavored chips have a deep dark brown hue. But when mixing masa and wheat flours with cocoa powder, the dough appeared too light. Moreover, when they attempted to fry the chip, it absorbed the oil and turned mushy. They tried frying it faster, but that burned the chocolate and made it bitter. They played around with the formula, testing various types of cocoa and different proportions of water and dry ingredients. Finally, the color was right and the chip fried up with a nice “snap.”
If there’s one reliable rule of developing new processed foods, says Mattson's Stuckey, it’s that the small but crucial details can make or break the enterprise. “Closing the gap,” as she puts it—getting the product from 98 percent to 100 percent complete—often ends up “costing more than it’s worth.” For Baskin-Robbins’ play on nachos, the Waffle Chip Dippers, they wanted chips made from brownies to sit alongside crispy waffles in a bowl of ice cream. This involved smashing a brownie into a 1/16th-inch-thick disc, then baking and slicing it. And the whole process needed to match the cooking time for the waffle chips, so a restaurant worker could prepare both types of chips together. At their R&D labs in Canton, Massachusetts, Baskin-Robbins executive chef Stan Frankenthaler and his team discovered that the low temperature of the waffle iron worked perfectly for baking brownies into crisps without scorching them.
Using the same tool for both chips was a relief. But now there was the problem of area: What size of brownie square, an inch tall, do you need to fill the waffle iron at the correct thickness? Many burnt brownies later, and “a few burnt fingertips as well,” they found the right-size square. “Trial and error is a big part of development,” Frankenthaler says.
Finally, they had to figure out how to cut the waffle and brownie discs into “chips” during the 10- to 15-second window before they become too crisp to do anything with. After trying devices like a two-handled knife, they opted for a pizza wheel because it was fast and easy and could be used with one hand. A straightforward and low tech solution, for sure, but it meant that with the launch of Waffle Chip Dippers, Baskin-Robbins had to outfit all its ice cream shops with pizza wheels and paper templates to show workers how to cut the chips.
For all that work, sales weren’t strong enough to give the Waffle Chip Dippers a permanent spot on the menu, and it disappeared from stores in October—just four weeks after it arrived. It’s an important reminder to the fast food innovators of the world: The nature of stunts is that they often fail.
