Last May, in an announcement so quiet and under-the-radar that it might as well have been included in a bill about net neutrality, Taco Bell released a brand new waffle breakfast taco in a limited test run at restaurants in Southern California. By August, the success of the waffle taco and its subsequent myth had spread like wildfire, and the popular fast food chain soon announced that Fresno, Omaha and Chattanooga would also be getting waffle tacos, because the gods clearly favorite people in those cities and not the rest of us. “You’ll have to wait until 2014,” they said as they mocked us, but Taco Bell never offered a national release date. That is, until today.
On March 27, Taco Bell’s First Meal menu will officially become a full breakfast menu, with everything from the waffle taco to the A.M. Crunch Wrap, which basically looks like a quesadilla with breakfast foods, and even the Cinnabon Delights for the people who truly hate their lives, being offered to the general public from sea to shining sea. And there’s only one reason that Taco Bell is unleashing this wave of unbridled excess until 11 each morning – capitalism. Deep fried capitalism.
“We can turn the breakfast conversation into a two-horse race,” Taco Bell President Brian Niccol said in an interview, noting that Taco Bell intends to be a “strong No. 2” after McDonald’s. (Via the AP)
Cue a billion “strong No. 2” jokes. Potty humor aside, I’m sure that McDonald’s is scared, no?
“I think they’re going to find that going into the breakfast business is not like what they’re accustomed to, in terms of marketing,” [U.S. brand and strategy officer for McDonald’s Kevin] Newell said. The breakfast menus of the two chains only have one main offering that seems to go head-to-head, a sausage and egg burrito.
Oh sure, Mr. Newell can act like he and Mayor McCheese are unaffected by this announcement, and the Fry Guys and Skeletor or whoever will go back to slinging their hash brown patties into our big, fat faces each day, but McDonald’s wouldn’t be mulling its own huge decision if Taco Bell wasn’t posing some kind of threat. In the very near future, if you walk into a McDonald’s at 10:31 AM and worry that it’s too late for a McGriddle, you might finally be able to smile and still dig in.
“We know, as an example, that breakfast on the weekend cut off at 10:30 doesn’t go very well,” Jeff Stratton, head of McDonald’s USA, said in an interview.
Stratton declined to provide any details on how McDonald’s would adjust kitchen operations to make breakfast later in the day.
“Well, we’re just beginning. … We’re just taking a look at it,” he said. (Via the AP)
I know that “taking a look at it” doesn’t mean much in terms of whether or not something will happen, but the timing says it all. If Taco Bell makes a dent in McDonald’s breakfast sales, there will be changes made. Sort of like the changes to your diets that will need to be made when you’re in your 30s, because you spent too much of your 20s eating breakfast at McDonald’s and Taco Bell.
Until March 27, though, Taco Bell will continue to contend with the likes of White Castle when it comes to winning over the public. Especially supermodels.
Keep it civil, you guys. We all know what comes after this…