Liz Matthews, Taco Bell’s chief meals innovation officer, touted the curd-based synergy between the 2 manufacturers. “We’re thrilled about this new concept with Cheez-It, which gives our fans the chance to experience the real cheese and crunch they love from both of our brands in a whole new way,” she stated in a news launch.
Taco Bell is clearly making an attempt to seize the identical type of magic it did with another snack-food collaboration, its Doritos Locos Taco, which swaps a typical crunchy shell for one made with the favored chip. The menu merchandise, which leaves only a trace of Doritos’s iconic orange-cheese mud on an eater’s fingers (this was really a key a part of the menu merchandise’s research and development process), has been an enormous hit for Taco Bell because it was launched in 2012.
And in another cheese-meets-crunch marriage, it has beforehand supplied a beef burrito whose contents included Fritos corn chips.
Taco Bell, which lately opened a brand new mobile-app-friendly, contactless drive-through restaurant idea in suburban Minneapolis, isn’t hiding the concept that such menu gadgets are squarely geared toward shoppers’ allegiances to their favourite snack meals, relationships that usually return to their childhoods. It promised the brand new Cheez-It collaboration would provide an “abundantly cheesy and nostalgic, yet magically modern, dining experience.”
The Cheez-It model, too, has dabbled in different crossovers, together with a short fling with Pizza Hut. The two mixed forces for a big Cheez-It cracker stuffed with cheese and served with marinara sauce for dipping, a hippocampus of a dish that appeared doomed from the beginning as a result of it failed to capitalize on the cracker’s well-known crunch.
Fast-food chains typically take a look at out menus at restricted areas earlier than including them to menus nationwide, so it’s potential that the brand new cracker-meets-tostada will get a wider viewers. More than lots of its rivals, Taco Bell appears to relish serving up a gentle stream of latest menu gadgets, which typically means the corporate has to rotate gadgets off its menu — one thing that usually causes agitation amongst die-hard followers. In the case of the Mexican pizza, the corporate eliminated the favored merchandise (together with a slate of others) in 2020, solely to reintroduce it this 12 months — which created a cycle of outcry (as a result of there’s no such factor as dangerous press?) and anticipation.