Secrets Taco Bell Doesn't Want You To Know

When in the 19th century, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow penned "The Bells of San Blas," a poem about a town on the Pacific Coast of Mexico, he had never visited the town. He never did visit, but whatever. Bells are famous the world 'round. But don't worry about all that — real bells have nothing to do with Taco Bell. It's just the founder's last name. Glen Bell opened Bell's Drive-in and Taco Tia in 1954. "Tia" is Spanish for "aunt," but Bell probably didn't know that. He targeted Caucasians with his exotic international food. After selling Tia (the restaurant, not his aunt) to his partners, he opened his first Taco Bell in 1962. Only two short years later he franchised his first franchisee opened a branch and a chain was born. Just think — with a few different marriages along the way, it could have been Taco Knippelberg.

Of all the advertising slogans Taco Bell tried, nothing could possibly top a tiny dog asking for Taco Bell in Spanish. The Chihuahua created a sensation across America, and led to calls for boycotts from Latino activists. (Plus, the Spanish isn't an exact translation, but this is a food site, not a Spanish lesson.) Regardless, Taco Bell should thank its lucky stars for the guys who came up with the little dog idea. But instead, Taco Bell just stole the idea.

Joseph Shields and Thomas Rinks came up with a character called Psycho Chihuahua, a little dog that wouldn't back down from any challenge. Taco Bell executives were intrigued by the dog and approached the pair about an advertising campaign using the character. But the executives passed on using a chihuahua as the focus of the advertising campaign. Instead, they went with ... a chihuahua. Naturally, Shields and Rinks sued and were initially awarded a bit over $30 million in 2003. Of course Taco Bell appealed the verdict and it took years for a decision, but eventually a judge ruled. And Taco Bell shouldn't have appealed because the final decision was a $42 million judgment for liberating the character of the chihuahua.

Bacon wasn't the first time Taco Bell tried to "think outside the bun." In fact, they thought so much outside the bun that they put everything inside a bun. In the 1970s, Taco Bell introduced the Bell Beefer — basically a sloppy Joe. Unlike the bacon concoction of the 1990s, the Bell Beefer wasn't half bad. It gets a lot of love in nostalgia pages and even has a Facebook plea for its return. Taco Bell stopped carrying the Bell Beefer in the 1980s as the menu focused on more traditional Tex-Mex items. It certainly didn't help that it was the only thing on the menu that came in a bun, whereas pretty much everything else was a multi-tasker; soft and hard shells were available in multiple dishes.

In the late 1990s, an odd food fad struck America: calling something "extreme." Everybody did it, and for some reason, "extreme" was a code word in the fast food industry for bacon. Bacon seemingly was the missing ingredient for everything and every shop was slapping bacon on something. Even Boston Market got into the act by paying a talking head to pitch their bacon stuff. Well, if you think Taco Bell sat idly by while people were putting bacon where it didn't belong, you are sorely mistaken.

Enter the Sizzlin' Bacon menu items. A bacon cheeseburger burrito, a BLT taco, and a chicken club burrito were all rolled out in 1995. If you're thinking bacon on a taco is the most unholy concoction imaginable, you're correct. People tend to wax poetic on things from a bygone era, but there are things in life you can't untaste and my first and only BLT taco — consumed in March 1996 — still gives me indigestion just thinking of it.

There was a time when Taco Bell didn't rule the international fast food world. It faced competition from Del Taco, and there still was a learning curve for learning all those foreign words. Then, suddenly, Taco Bell exploded nationwide, very unconventionally. In 1990, Taco Bell introduced a radical new menu. The majority of its menu was priced in three tiers: 59 cents, 79 cents, and 99 cents. Suddenly, every broke college student could get one item at each price point and a small soda (with free refills) for around $3.12 and still have money left over for beers. (Trust me, that was my four years of college eating.) But it wasn't just the college kid cashing in on the savings. A whole lot of people did, and Taco Bell saw 10 to 15 percent sales increases across all stores, with an overall 25 percent growth in the first year of lower pricing alone. The lower pricing worked, and Taco Bell created an empire.

John Galardi needed a job. He moved from Missouri to the sunny shores of California for a new life, and after three days with no income he grew desperate. He pulled into Glen Bell's Taco Tia and asked for a job. Bell saw the kid as a go-getter and hired him on the spot. Galardi learned a lot from Bell and saw the formation and growth of Taco Bell. That inspired him to try his own chain restaurant. He decided to focus on a more traditional American fare, and what's more American than hot dogs? So he settled on an all-American name: Der Weinerschnitzel. Wait, what?

Obviously that's not very American, so they changed it by dropping the "Der" and just calling it Wienerschnitzel. They're still located all over the West. But you know what they don't have? Wienerschnitzel. As you may know, wienerschnitzel is a German dish in which breaded veal is lightly pan-fried. So why don't Wienerschnitzel restaurants carry any wienerschnitzel? Galardi didn't name the place. He remained close with Glen Bell, and it was Bell's wife who came up with the name. She scanned a cookbook, came across a wienerschnitzel recipe, and suggested the name. "It was a stupid name," Galardi admitted in 2012. Needless to say, if the restaurant ever opens a location in Germany it'll have a lot of confused customers.

A fast food restaurant empire is a huge undertaking, and providing thousands of outlets with all the ingredients it needs makes for a complicated supply chain involving dozens of independent vendors for which the final client has little to no oversight. The occasional result: a food safety issue, where impurities or dangerous germs can make their unwelcome way to the menu, detected after it's too late. Taco Bell has been the source of several such scandals, which could damage its reputation and hurt business.

Per CNN, a 2006 outbreak of E.coli, a potentially deadly food-borne pathogen, made 71 Taco Bell customers very sick, with experts believing tainted lettuce was the culprit. Five years later, according to the Los Angeles Times, 18 Taco Bell locations were connected to a salmonella outbreak that seriously sickened 68 people, primarily in Texas and Oklahoma.

In 2019, according to CBS News, three different Taco Bell customers reported finding tiny pieces of metal in their food, prompting Taco Bell to launch a massive recall-and-disposal drive, removing 2.3 million pounds of seasoned ground beef (used in tacos and burritos) from hundreds of outlets in 21 states in the eastern U.S. Before the recall was announced, Taco Bell was oddly cagey, according to Business Insider, not allowing customers to order beef-based selections without publicly providing a reason.