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Grilled Cheese Dipping Taco: “You will notice that there is a little bit of grilled cheese on the outside of this. It's a fresh fried white corn shell, and you've got shredded beef on the inside. It's loaded up with cheese on the inside and outside.
“This was actually inspired by birria, so again, amazing shredded beef on the inside, then
most often you dip it, when you're eating a birria taco, into an au jus. Well, you’ve got your au jus (Taco Bell’s red sauce), but now you've also got nacho cheese, and it's an amazing flavor combination. Consumers love that they've got the option to dip it.
“When you think about birria, it is all about the experience, and usually you just get protein on the inside and consumers told us like they wanted some cheesy notes to it. So again, it's our twist.” – Liz Matthews
Grilled Cheese Steak Fries: “So you take our Nacho Fries, you top them with all the good stuff: You've got a Chipotle sauce on there, you've got carne asada, and then we grill cheese on the top. So it's a whole new way of eating French fries.” – Liz Matthews
“The other cool piece about this is the packaging, I must say, because you'll notice the packaging kind of acts as a barrier around the product so that we can grill that cheese on top. And then when you peel that packaging back, you'll notice how the cheese does not stick to it. It stays on the food. [It required] packaging innovation — working with our suppliers to get it right.” – Missy Schaaphok
“We'll be honest with you. We've been working on this packaging for quite some time, because you'd be surprised when you put paper on a grill. What happens is it can catch on fire. (Laughter). So really, making sure that we've got the right packaging for it, I'd say we've worked on this for probably a few years. But you can see how golden and delicious and beautiful it is, and a different way to eat fries.” – Liz Matthews
Vegan Nacho Sauce: “We have our vegan sticker on there, so you can differentiate it from our regular nacho cheese sauce. So earlier this year, it tested with a different product that we developed, a Vegan Crunchwrap. So we did that in three stores across the U.S., and now we're leaning into the vegan nacho sauce, because that definitely rose to the top and we wanted to build on that momentum and bring that to the masses. … We're very excited to pair that with Nacho Fries, because it's just the perfect condiment.” – Missy Schaaphok
“I think that's kind of where that restless creativity comes in, because people are like, ‘Why didn't you do this sooner?’ It's like, well, because we couldn't get it to taste right. … There are some opportunities out there in the world for vegan cheese, and cheese is so delicious that we just wanted to make sure that we could get it to this amazing taste. So it took some time.” – Liz Matthews
Crispanada: “Inside this cute bag is what we're calling a Crispanada, which looks like a dessert, but it is a savory treat. So you break into that and what you'll see inside is our delicious shredded chicken in a very tasty, craveable sauce. And again, it comes like this, but you can dip it in a sauce if you wanted to. You get this beautiful batter on the outside that gives it that nice crisp, and then the very tender and juicy shredded chicken on the inside.” – Missy Schaaphok
Strawberry Crème Freeze & Strawberry Twists: “This is our strawberry freeze, and if you'll notice, there's a cream on the bottom. So it's a strawberry cream and then we paired that with some strawberry cream twists, which are amazing.” – Liz Matthews
Baja Blast Gelato: “That is something that we just put into what we call a learning lab because again, this restless creativity, we've got venues where we basically can test things really quickly and see what consumers think about it. So it was in one of our learning labs and it was very, very successful. People loved it. I would have thought consumers would have preferred ice cream, and our consumers actually leaned towards the gelato. So again, listening to our consumers and understanding what they want.” – Liz Matthews
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