👋, I’m Kimberly. I’ve been creating obsession-worthy brands for the past fifteen years. And now, I’m giving away my secrets every week in this newsletter.
When I think of Taco Bell, I think of my childhood best friend Kevin Lin. As kids, we lived right around the corner from each other in New Orleans (technically, the suburb of Kenner - which is so close to the city it can barely be called a suburb). And as kids Kevin really, really, really loved Taco Bell.
After changing to different middle schools, our parents eventually moving, and us not attending the same college, Kevin and I reconnected in San Francisco in its 2000s Tech Heyday, where we both ended up living and working — me doing my branding thing, and Kevin making the world a more streaming place as one of the co-founders of Twitch.
And while both Kevin and I had grown and changed in many ways, and continue to, one thing remains forever the same: Kevin’s undying and everlasting passion for Taco Bell. And he’s by far and away not the only one.
Taco Bell has inspired legions of some of the world’s most ardent fans. When the Doritos Loco Taco was being tested, people would drive hundreds of miles for it — one man drove across the country. Passionate eaters have started Change.org petitions to bring back menu favorites like the Mexican Pizza. The Las Vegas Taco Bell hosts hundreds of weddings a year in a taco-themed chapel.
And in 2023, one couple won a full-on production: a Taco Bell Metaverse wedding.
In a recent issue of the New Yorker, writer Antonia Hitchens goes behind the scenes at Taco Bell’s laboratory-like Innovation Kitchen and talks to the people who are responsible for the Bell’s most head-scratchingly brilliant, why-didn’t-I-think-of-that awesome, and genuinely WTF-style inventions.
And what struck me multiple times while reading it was how so many of the rules that the Innovation Kitchen follows while ideating and molding their creations also apply to brands.
So with that, today I bring you a snapshot of 9 awesome lessons from the Taco Bell Innovation Kitchen, and how you can use them as you grow your brand.
1. Fully Immerse Yourself in the World of Your Product Category, And Always Keep Tabs On It
[The Innovation Kitchen] regularly takes groups of employees on food-immersion trips to cities around the world, where they eat for four days. “Then there are text chains, Slack chats, voice memos in the middle of the night about potatoes.”
2. Examine Every Aspect of Your Product Both During AND After Development
Its work is intricate, [The Innovation Kitchen] 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.)
3. Always Be Testing New Ideas — And Don’t Let Fear or Failure Stop You
To release about ten new products a year, Taco Bell’s innovation scientists test roughly seventy; to come up with those seventy, they consider thousands of ideas… Failure is a big part of the job. There’s more items that don’t make it than ones that do… And there are things that are before their time. Hypotheses are tested; experiments rarely pan out. The Crispy Melt Taco, introduced in 2021, “started out blue, because we made it with blue corn. We called it Midnight Melt and Forbidden Taco, to try to give it a reason for having a blue shell. But people were confused—like, Is it made for nighttime? Is this old? What’s forbidden? What happened to it? The masses don’t know that blue corn is a thing—they don’t shop at Trader Joe’s… We introduce things to the masses.” (Other items that haven’t made the grade: the Croissant Taco, Crispy Cheese Curd Loaded Fries, Seafood Salad.)
5. Find the “Dynamic Contrast” That Gets Pleasure and Excitement Flowing as It Relates to Your Product Category
The Doritos Locos Taco, or D.L.T., is designed to target taste buds using “dynamic contrast”—in this case, the sensation of biting through the crispy shell to the fat-laced filling. Exactly half of a D.L.T.’s hundred and seventy calories are from fat, the ideal ratio for a pleasing mouthfeel. The lactic acid and citric acid in the Doritos dust get saliva flowing and excite the brain’s pleasure center, signalling you to eat more.
6. Balance Familiarity with Innovation
We’re balancing familiarity with innovation… Like, when we had avocado in breakfast items, you look at the heartland and that wasn’t resonating.
7. Connect Over Emotion & Nostalgia
[In the all-important naming process], the cheese-topped burrito became the Grilled Cheese Burrito. “The name brings out emotion and nostalgia,” Liz Matthews, the global chief food-innovation officer said. In the Innovation Kitchen, the words “nostalgia,” “emotion,” and “memory” are in heavy rotation.
8. Build Content Based on Who Your Audience Is
Sean Tresvant, a Taco Bell branding director, [said] that the company’s mission is to “build content for cultural rebels.” It’s no accident that the flurry of new-product launches, which in the trade have come to be known as “stunt food,” has tracked precisely with the rise of social media.
9. Really Listen to Your Customer Feedback
The company is sensitive to feedback. The headquarters has a situation room called the Fish Bowl, ringed by video screens monitoring the brand’s mentions on social media. In 2015, in response to consumer requests, the company removed artificial colors and flavors from its menus, and it now uses cage-free eggs. Nineteen years after the documentary “Super Size Me” conditioned Americans to equate fast food with pink slime, Taco Bell has, through the power of marketing, managed to make itself not just socially acceptable but post-ironically hip.
10. Always Be Comfortable Reinventing Yourself
People tell us everything they feel. We’re Madonna. We’re always reinventing ourselves.
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More About Me
I’ve created indie darling brands (Biossance, Patchology, exa), developed Fortune 500 brands (Netflix, Gap, Wyndham), rebranded global brands (Crabtree & Evelyn, Paula's Choice), founded my own DTC brand (Archer), and run in-house teams for brands (Sephora).
My work has won over 80 awards—including Clios, Addys & 30 Under 30. And I was recently named one of the Forbes Next 1000.
I earned my BA and MA at Stanford, where wrote my thesis on the negative mental effects of gender stereotypes in advertising. And today, I devote 100% of my time to working with founders who are 100% committed to using their brands’ impact for good—developing healthy mental models for a better world.