How Taco Bell Nailed Its Innovative New Quesalupa

For combining corn, beans, meat, and cheese into genius.

- Jonathan Ringen

On a recent evening, Taco Bell CEO Brian Niccol was hanging out at his Newport Beach, California, home when an idea popped into his head—a menu item designed to appeal to young, ravenously hungry customers on their way home after a night of partying. Niccol, 42, was thinking about his days as an engineering student at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, where he had a favorite lunch spot with a simple gimmick. “We went to this place called Bagel & Deli that had all these great names for their sandwiches,” he says, sitting on a sofa in his large, comfortable corner office at Taco Bell’s Irvine, California, headquarters. “I was like, ‘Why haven’t we thought of having great names for our burritos?’ ” (Taco Bell’s current offerings tend to have monikers like “Shredded Chicken Burrito” or “Beefy 5-Layer Burrito.”) He fired off a text to Taco Bell’s chief food innovation officer, Liz Matthews, that included a name borrowed from Bagel & Deli: “the After Burner.” Niccol didn’t give many further instructions. Whatever those two words might conjure in the minds of Matthews and her crew of chefs and food scientists would be the starting point. “What’s in the burrito?” he says in his office a few days later. “I don’t know! Make it up.”

From an outsider’s perspective, the After Burner seems like a less-than-ideal name; with Chipotle battling food-poisoning issues, you’d think a Mexican fast-food chain would avoid any suggestion that a burrito might cause burning in your, you know,