Taco Bell

Taco Bell is an American fast-food chain founded by Glen Bell in suburban Los Angeles in 1962, built on the crisp ground-beef taco that Bell adapted from Mexican American taco stands in San Bernardino. Through franchising it carried the hard-shell taco to every US state and became, for many Americans far from the border, their first idea of Mexican food.

History

Glen Bell opened a hamburger stand in San Bernardino, California, in 1948, across the street from Mitla Cafe, a Mexican restaurant opened in 1937 by Lucia Rodriguez and her husband Salvador that sold cheap, crisp tacos of ground beef, lettuce and yellow cheese. According to Mitla's owners, Bell watched the lines for those tacos and asked the family how they were made. The Takeout reports that he learned their frying method and built his own fry basket. In 1954 he opened Taco Tia, a stand selling crisp fried tacos, and in 1962 he launched Taco Bell in a Los Angeles suburb. Texas Monthly notes that within a few years Bell was franchising the business and mass-producing shells, which soon appeared in supermarkets too.

Bell's authorized biography presents him as the inventor of the fast-food taco shell, but historian Jeffrey Pilcher found taco-shell patents issued to Mexican restaurateurs in the 1940s and argues that Bell's real innovation was applying franchising to Mexican food, making it available to white customers who would not visit Mexican neighborhoods in an era of segregation. Mitla's family has said that Lucia Rodriguez received little recognition. A 2023 episode of the PBS SoCal series Lost LA, featuring Los Angeles Times columnist Gustavo Arellano, described Mitla as having planted the seeds for both Taco Bell and Del Taco. Glen Bell died in 2010.

Growth and products

By 2012, NPR reported, Taco Bell was based in Irvine, California, operated about 6,500 restaurants in all fifty states and close to a dozen other countries, and sold more than two billion tacos a year. A company executive said that in the Midwest and Northeast the chain effectively defined Mexican food for many customers. Its efforts to open in Mexico itself have repeatedly failed, as Pilcher has noted.

In March 2012 the chain introduced the Doritos Locos Taco, a ground beef taco in a shell made with the seasoning of Nacho Cheese Doritos, produced with Frito-Lay. Texas Monthly reported that it sold 100 million in about ten weeks, prompting the company to hire around 15,000 additional workers across roughly 6,000 restaurants and plan Cool Ranch and spicy versions.

Influence and reception

Taco Bell is a lightning rod in debates over authenticity. Gustavo Arellano, who has said he never liked the food, has nonetheless argued that the chain brought Mexican restaurants to places that had none, showed non-Mexicans that the cuisine could be profitable, helped popularize the burrito, made Spanish-language branding such as its slogan Live Más mainstream, and opened the door to hybrid foods like the Korean taco. Arellano has also suggested that much of the American obsession with authentic Mexican food arose as a reaction against Taco Bell's novelty items.

Where to try it

• Mitla Cafe, San Bernardino, California: Mexican restaurant across from Glen Bell's burger stand, often cited as the inspiration for Taco Bell's tacos.

Reviews

See also

• Hard-shell taco
• Del Taco
• Cal-Mex tacos
• Korean taco

References

1. "An Oral History of Hard Shell Tacos". MEL Magazine. Retrieved 2026-10-10.
2. "Where Did the Taco Come From?". Smithsonian Magazine. Retrieved 2026-10-10.
3. "The California Taco Trail: How Mexican Food Conquered America". NPR (republished by KAXE). Retrieved 2026-10-10.
4. "Did Taco Bell Help Make Mexican Food Better?". Texas Monthly. Retrieved 2026-10-10.
5. "Taco Bell Has Sold 100 Million Doritos Locos Tacos". Texas Monthly. Retrieved 2026-10-10.
6. "The Great Hard-shell Taco Debate". Texas Monthly. Retrieved 2026-10-10.
7. "Lost LA | Taco Bell's Fast Food Origin Story". PBS SoCal. Retrieved 2026-10-10.
8. "How Taco Bell Was Founded On A Stolen Idea". The Takeout. Retrieved 2026-10-10.