Taco Bell Tries To Strike Gold Again With 16x-Bigger Cheez-Its: Drive-Thru Diary

CALIFORNIA — French's Mustard-flavored Skittles. Pringles topped with caviar. KFC's Cheetos Sandwich.

The world of food brand collaborations is a revolving door, where inventive mashups and downright strange marriages often come and go with little fanfare. This year, national restaurants are at it again with a range of new items that tap familiar brands to create new novelties in a bid to lure in customers.

Krispy Kreme started off 2024 with a Biscoff cookie butter doughnut. IHOP found an unlikely partner for its familiar syrup flavor profile in a classic soft drink when it brought back the Pepsi Maple Syrup Cola. And Wendy's continues to lean into desserts with its Cinnabon Pull-Apart pastry.

In the ephemeral landscape of fast-food brand collabs, there is one king: Taco Bell.

The chain's Doritos Locos Taco has proven itself as a rare product with a staying power strong enough to elevate it to icon status. And Taco Bell is trying to strike liquid, cheesy gold once again as it launches a new mashup with another junk-food household name this week.

Taco Bell — known for its savvy at creating inventive menu items by shuffling around a handful of Mexican-adjacent ingredients — shook up the hum-drum hardshell taco in 2012 when it introduced the Doritos Locos Taco.

The concept was something out of a stoner fever dream, ingeniously simple in its revolutionariness — What if you made a taco shell out of a giant Nacho Cheese Dorito?

Fans loved it. Taco Bell sold 100 million Doritos Locos Tacos within 10 weeks, according to reports at the time. Taco Bell was quick to point out it took McDonald's 18 years to sell its first 100 million hamburgers. (Not the fairest comparison, but fast-food marketing is a blood sport).

But just like the McDonald's hamburger launched in 1940, Taco Bell found a stalwart in its Frankenstein taco. The Nacho Cheese variety is now a year-round fixture on menus nationwide, along with other, more ephemeral flavors like Fiery and Cool Ranch.

Taco Bell diner's loyalty helped the chain outpace sluggish industrywide growth coming out of the pandemic, and its experimental spirit led it to be named by Fast Company as one of the Most Innovative Companies of 2024.

But never one to rest on its laurels, Taco Bell keeps on dreaming up new ways to satisfy the strangest of cravings. On Thursday, two new menu items, centered on a scaled-up version of a snack-aisle favorite, became available nationwide.

Imagine a Cheez-It, but 16 times bigger. That's at the heart of the Big Cheez-It Crunchwrap Supreme. It's a Crunchwrap — another limited-time offering that has since become a Taco Bell standby — but the typical large tortilla chip inside is swapped out for that giant Cheez-It.

The Big Cheez-It Tostada is a similar story: A humungous Cheez-It piled high with beef, tomatoes, lettuce, cheese and sour cream.

As a fan of both Cheez-Its and Crunchwrap Supremes, I was delighted when my Taco Bell app gave me a chance to try the Big Cheez-It Crunchwrap earlier this week.

In my typical Taco Bell dining setting — pulled over on a side street in Glendale, praying not to get nacho cheese on my seats — I took a bite. Crunchy. Cheesy. And surprisingly salty, even for Taco Bell.

While the normal Crunchwrap's interior hard tortilla creates a kind of divine balance against the other mushy ingredients — where all seem to blend together to create something more than the sum of its parts — the Big Cheez-It is the star here.

The giant cracker is thick and crunchy, but with an interesting tenderness — almost chewiness — that announces itself boldly in the diner's every bite.

My verdict? I just can't see this becoming Taco Bell's next modern classic.

While the Doritos Locos Taco breathed new life into the modest hardshell taco — previously a side-item one ordered alongside one of Taco Bell's more interesting creations — the Crunchwrap's novelty still hasn't worn out nearly 20 years after it was first introduced.

In my mind, it is the perfect fast-food menu item that needs no reinvention.

Drive-Thru Diary is a journey of all that's delicious, noteworthy and downright weird in the world of fast food, quick bites and the culinary field at large. Got an idea? I'd love to hear from you: [email protected].