Taco emoji

The taco emoji (🌮) is a pictograph of a taco added to the Unicode emoji set in 2015, after a public campaign in which the Taco Bell chain petitioned the Unicode Consortium; its design was later redrawn by some platforms from a hard shell to a softer taco.

Campaign

In November 2014 the Unicode Consortium, which maintains the emoji standard, published a list of candidate characters that included a taco. LAist reported in January 2015 that Taco Bell had started a Change.org petition a couple of months earlier asking for the taco to be approved, and that it had passed 22,400 signatures. José R. Ralat, writing for VICE's Munchies in 2016, gave a later count of 32,783 signatures and quoted a Taco Bell spokesman pointing out that the emoji keyboard had five mailboxes and a dozen trains but no taco. Unicode, for its part, told Ralat that its emoji subcommittee had chosen the taco before any petition was filed.

Release and design

The taco arrived in 2015 together with a burrito emoji. The early artwork showed a crunchy hard-shell taco. Ralat reported that Apple's iOS 10.2 update redrew it to look more like a soft taco, while, according to Emojipedia, Google and Samsung kept the crisp shell at the time.

Reception

Ralat, writing about the single hard-shell design, suggested the burrito emoji could stand in for a rolled taco. The arrival of the character also spawned novelty apps; Ralat noted that Taco Text, built by the Austin studio XOXCO for sending tacos to friends, logged about a quarter of a million tacos in its first days.

Reviews

See also

• Taco Bell
• Hard-shell taco
• Taco shell
• Taco Tuesday
• National Taco Day

References

1. "Taco Bell's Fighting The Good Fight To Get Us A Taco Emoji". LAist. Retrieved 2026-10-10.
2. "The Brief History of the Taco Emoji Now Has a Happy Ending". VICE. Retrieved 2026-10-10.