Will Mac n’ Cheetos create as many jobs as the Doritos Locos Taco?
Remember your fast food ancestors
The history of fast food mashups is not a long one, but the oils of failure are certainly slippery.
The web is collectively drooling over Burger King’s new Mac n’ Cheetos dish —essentially fried macaroni and cheese sticks rolled in radioactive-orange Cheeto dust—but we’ll have to wait for the June 27 release to see if they’re more than an online hit.
When experiments like the Ramen Burger and Taco Bell’s Doritos Locos Taco succeed, they can change a company’s entire approach.
Introduced in March 2012, the Doritos Locos Taco immediately became the virtuous culinary collaboration we never knew we required. It was so elegant in its simplicity, so seductive in its artifice. The crunchy beef envelopes flew off the shelves — er, out the drive-thru windows.
According to a 2013 Fast Company analysis, Taco Bell sold a mind-blowing 450 million Doritos-dusted tacos in just over a year after launch. (If you placed those tacos end to end, they would circle the globe more than twice.) Taco Bell suppliers built six dedicated manufacturing lines for the product, pre-launch, operated by a staff of 600. After the taco’s release, the company hired 15,000 new employees to meet the product’s demand — two to three new pairs of hands per restaurant.
Of course, for every frankenfood success story, there’s still a KFC Double Down.
