I've never eaten Taco Bell and I can't imagine I ever will, but thanks both to trips to the US in the past, and the cultural flattening of EVERYTHING due to the web, I am familiar with the brand, its products and the increasingly-weird stuff that comes out of its development kitchens – this piece is all about how those weird things get decided upon and made, and if you're anything like me it will make you want to work there SO MUCH.
This is super-interesting, in part because it's a window into a world that I have honestly never considered before (the fact that testing reveals the EXACT crunchiness people prefer in a tortilla chip, for example, to the point of 'lbs per square inch' pressure, is the sort of detail I go mad for) but also because it reveals quite a lot of interesting additional information (for example, the extent to which the increasingly cheese-heavy Taco Bell menu is a direct byproduct of what is effectively decades of hardcore lobbying by the US Dairy Management industry) about exactly how and why millions upon millions of people eat what they do.
[via Webcurios]
