In a somewhat sneaky–but brilliant–move, the world’s largest restaurant chain is testing a menu item that’s going to fly out of its deep fryers. Hungry hordes everywhere are praying the loaded bacon and cheese basket of fries comes to a location near them soon. Yet it can’t be denied that the loaded bacon and cheese basket is pretty big. Admittedly, the fast food behemoth is marketing the fries as an item to be shared by two people. But it’s also a given that lots of people are going to sit down to eat them solo, in spite of the fact that the basket reportedly packs 880 calories. There’s no stopping it. You may have to wait a while to get the loaded fries.
For now, only lucky eaters in select locations will get to indulge. According to Brand Eating, the new menu item has been seen in the Greater Pittsburgh area, Central West Virginia, Southeast Ohio and Eastern Kentucky. (Inc.com)
Meanwhile….
No other cheese at Taco Bell, however, had to perform like the Quesalupa cheese. It had to be what CEO Niccol terms “an experience,” a full five-sense extravaganza of melt and stretch. Before McClintock arrived, Gomez and his team had tested a glorified quesadilla folded in half, but consumers rejected it. “It didn’t live up to the promise of a truly cheese-stuffed shell,” Gomez recalls. Once they tried sealing off the sides, though, “it was like ‘Holy crap, we can sell this.’ ”How to mass-produce the shells became McClintock’s problem. She applied her doctorate in chemistry to the cheese filling, comparing various varieties’ chemical compositions, specifically the interplay between molecules of a protein called casein found in the space around milk fat. Think of casein as dairy glue that, at the right temperature and pH, gives cheese its pull by binding water and fat in a smooth matrix. Farmers poured out almost 50 million gallons of unsold milk last year—actually poured it out, into holes in the ground—according to U.S. Department of Agriculture data. In an August 2016 letter, the National Milk Producers Federation begged the USDA for a $150 million bailout.
That Taco Bell is developing its cheesiest products ever in the midst of an historic dairy oversupply is no accident. There exists a little-known, government-sponsored marketing group called Dairy Management Inc. (DMI), whose job it is to squeeze as much milk, cheese, butter, and yogurt as it can into food sold both at home and abroad. Until recently, the “Got Milk?” campaign was its highest-impact success story. But for the past eight years, the group has been the hidden hand guiding most of fast food’s dairy hits—a kind of Illuminati of cheese—including and especially the Quesalupa. In 2012 it embedded food scientist Lisa McClintock with the Taco Bell product development team. She worked with the senior manager for product development, Steve Gomez, to develop a cheese filling that would stretch like taffy when heated, figured out how to mass-produce it, and helped invent some proprietary machinery along the way.(Bloomberg) 😐