Idea For Taco Bell’s Waffle Taco Came From Facebook Photo Of A Folded Waffle Sandwich

When you’re posting things on the Internet, you never know where they’ll end up eventually. So it goes with one Facebook user’s photo of a folded over waffle sandwich at a California restaurant, which ended up morphing into Taco Bell’s waffle breakfast taco.

In a profile that is solely dedicated to uncovering the apparent mystery behind the waffle taco (which seems pretty straightforward if you can read its name), Businessweek spoke with the director of product development at Taco Bell, Heather Mottershaw.

She says inspiration struck while she was scrolling through Facebook and saw a friend’s snap of a waffle sandwich filled with eggs, avocados and other Southern California ingredients.

“I went, huh, that’s an interesting idea,” she says.

So she ran out and bought supermarket waffles and started trying to figure out how to make it into a taco-like holder. She ended up leaving a frozen waffle to thaw at room temperature, then folding it, flash frying it in a chalupa basket and voila, a crispy waffle taco shell to hold eggs, sausage and cheese.

Mottershaw took her discovery back to Taco Bell the next morning and served it up.

“As soon as the team started to see it,” she says, “there was this instant excitement, this buzz that this is a cool idea, this is a big idea.”

And now you know where that thing you’d either chow down on happily or have it be the last thing that ever gets near your mouth came from [cue "the more you know" rainbow].

Taco Bell’s Secret Recipe for New Products [Businessweek]

by Mary Beth Quirk via Consumerist