Name: A Look Inside Taco Bell’s Test Kitchen
Uploaded: 2025-11-22T04:33:00Z
Duration: 4 min 45 s
Description: Restaurants are turning to limited time items as customers pull back on fast food. WSJ visited Taco Bell’s test kitchen to see inside its menu-creation process.

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Restaurants are turning to limited time items as customers pull back on fast food. WSJ visited Taco Bell’s test kitchen to see inside its menu-creation process. Photo Illustration: David Hall

https://m.wsj.net/video/20251120/dcd80f88-f490-459c-bcfe-6d6f713a571d/1/hls/manifest-hd-wifi.m3u8

Restaurants are turning to limited time items as customers pull back on fast food. WSJ visited Taco Bell’s test kitchen to see inside its menu-creation process.

A Look Inside Taco Bell’s Test Kitchen

Narrator: This is Taco Bell's test kitchen.

Today we're looking at various kinds of cheeses and what makes the perfect rolled quesadilla.

Narrator: Many of the items created here will bear this label on Taco Bell's menu, joining the ranks of Cool Ranch Doritos Locos Tacos, the Cheez-It Tostada, and Crispy Chicken Nuggets. As fast food struggles to keep sales up, more restaurants are turning to limited-time offerings, or LTOs, to get customers in the door. WSJ's Heather Haddon took a look behind the scenes at how Taco Bell builds its limited-time menu, and how it's helped the restaurant weather the fast food pullback.

They're up to something. I don't know what they're doing over there.

Narrator: Any product that lands on Taco Bell's menu goes through three key stages in the test kitchen. Ideation.

We've been getting a lot of ideas from our customers.

Narrator: Execution.

Got to deliver crisp cheese.

Narrator: And testing.

Liz: We're testing different cheeses.

How long has that process taken for that product?

Probably about 12 months.

Narrator: Liz Matthews, Taco Bell's Chief Food Innovation Officer, knows this process well. For more than 10 years, she's been the guiding mind behind the chain's newest creations.

It is a big process. As long as we're keeping the consumer at the center of it and getting products that deliver an experience and flavor and texture, it will pay off.

Narrator: One menu item might cycle through this process several times, and can take anywhere from a few months to a decade before it makes it into a restaurant. Taco Bell estimates that it has as many as 100 different products in development at one time.

I like this, layered cheeses.

Layered cheeses.

I like that idea.

Narrator: Not every idea makes it out of this kitchen, and even if it makes the menu, it doesn't mean it will be a hit.

Are there ever instances where you feel like you got over your skis?

I think the fries was a good example of, you know, we just wanted to do it easy. That's where we got over our skis. Our fans were like, "No, that's not you."

Narrator: But when the recipe does hit, Taco Bell can bring back that offer again and again and again.

The magic really happened when we brought the fries, the seasoning, and the nacho cheese. And again, it's been a success on our menu ever since.

Narrator: Taco Bell's number of limited-time offerings has doubled in the last year.

One of the things that is increasingly more important to consumers is the availability of limited-time offers. It's just something consumers are looking for more now than they ever have historically.

Narrator: This is even more true for Gen Z, whose spending power is rapidly growing.

Everybody is a novelty seeker sometimes, and it just turns out that, you know, younger consumers who by default are the most frequent users of restaurants, tend to be the ones that gravitate toward that.

Narrator: While LTOs are one of the fastest-growing reasons customers choose where to eat, it still falls far below other factors, like quality, cleanliness, and price for portion size. For Taco Bell, consumers rank it highly when it comes to affordability, but it falls below other restaurants on perceived value based on food quality and service.

People are still looking for something that's fun and exciting, and if it happens to also be a great value, well, that's a bonus.

Narrator: Taco Bell wouldn't share the cost of routinely adding menu options, but says that it is not expensive.

If I'm Taco Bell and all I'm doing is I'm adding Hidden Valley Ranch to our sauce and creating a new sauce that then I can use across all of our existing platforms and I can call it a limited-time offer, that's a super low-stakes approach to take, both from an operational perspective, from a cost perspective, and yet, at the same time, it's going to generate the same degree of excitement.

Narrator: Taco Bell says about 21% of its sales in 2024 included a limited-time offering. But the goal isn't always to sell the LTO.

Makes you look because it's something new, but you don't have to be interested in that item for it to work because you're reminded of Taco Bell and how much you love that item that you get every time you go.

The consumer is moving so fast these days, and there's so, you know, there's so much access, whether you're on TikTok or online, everybody is learning about all these new flavors.

Narrator: Depending on the success of these LTOs, some will eventually earn a permanent spot on the menu. Taco Bell says it's working on making nacho fries a menu fixture by 2030.

When we're getting those kind of like, "Hey, you need to have this full-time," fries is one of those things that consumers want more of them. So we're working our best to make sure that we can get fries all the time. Doritos Locos Tacos, I think is a really great example of that. When we launched that, you know, consumers loved it and we took it away, but that was one of those ones where it's like, "I need to have this every day in my life." I've had this one this morning.

Yep.

At 8:30.

We like to wake you up with it.

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