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On July 19, 2017

In a usual year, Taco Bell juggles about 4,000 new menu ideas. A dozen, maybe, will ever see the light of day.

Trimming all this fat is the job of the chief food innovation officer, Liz Matthews, and a 40-person team of chefs, food scientists, nutritionists, microbiologists, chemists, and even one entomologist (he does food safety). Observers have unironically called this crew fast-food “disruptors.” In the past five years, Matthews’s team has trotted out such blockbuster menu items as the Doritos Locos Taco (in Nacho Cheese, Fiery, and Cool Ranch varieties), a breakfast taco with a waffle for a shell, and a chalupa with fried chicken in place of its usual flatbread. Until a year and a half ago, however, one simple idea had foiled them: a fried tortilla full of oozing, molten cheese.

“Having this fabulous taco with melty cheese in every single bite was something we started dreaming about 10 years ago,” Matthews says. After a decade-long journey of dairy and failure and resolve, that dream eventually became the Quesalupa, a taco served in a cheese-stuffed fried shell whose 2016 arrival was heralded by a Super Bowl ad featuring a cackling George Takei. Costing somewhere from $15 million to $20 million, it was Taco Bell’s most expensive ad campaign ever. And it paid off: The company sold out its run of 75 million Quesalupas during the product’s four-month limited release. Chief Executive Officer Brian Niccol called the launch, which featured its own Snapchat filter, “one for the record books.” Perhaps inevitably, the company began testing a Doritos Quesalupa Crunch in March.

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