| How did the chain outdo Burger King’s Bacon Sundae, Pizza Hut’s hot-dog-stuffed crust, Cinnabon’s Pizzabon, and KFC’s fried-chicken-flavored nail polish?  Illustration by Julian Glander The fast-food industry is embroiled in a salt-and-fat-based arms race in which chains like Pizza Hut and Cinnabon compete to offer customers new “stunt foods”—hot-dog-stuffed crust, bacon sundaes, chicken-flavored nail polish. But, as Antonia Hitchens writes in this week’s issue, Taco Bell may be out-stunting them all. Hitchens takes us inside Taco Bell’s Innovation Kitchen, in Irvine, California, where twelve chef scientists and sixty developers test and perfect new menu items. Their work is intricate and precise, and their development of such offerings as the Crunchwrap Supreme and the Grilled Cheese Burrito reads as a triumph of engineering and chemistry. The culinary wonder that is the Doritos Locos Taco, for example, was specifically created to have a lingering smell that stimulates food memories and cravings, while also tripping a neural signal that gives you the sensation that you’re full (and, as the taco’s many fanatics can attest, it totally works). To meet the daunting task of releasing ten new products every year, the minds in the Innovation Kitchen concern themselves with the big questions: “How do you make a Cheez-It snack cracker big enough to be a tostada?” and “Can fourteen Flamin’ Hot Fritos corn chips be added to the middle of a burrito and retain their crunch?” As Hitchens reminds us, these are questions about architecture and scalability. After all, she writes, “fast food is assembly, not cooking.” Support The New Yorker’s award-winning journalism. Subscribe today » | 
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