Designing a Taco
The inside story of the Taco Bell/Doritos marriage. The idea is pretty simple; this story is all about the execution. It's full of sweet, sincere, unintentionally hilarious lines like "To tackle this huge challenge, for months we shared know-how between the technical teams at Frito-Lay and Taco Bell" and "We had teams of engineers working day and night to get the seasoner working", but also interesting stuff like...
"When you buy a bag of Doritos and you open it, and some of the corners are broken off, you're probably not going to be that mad, because they're still Doritos," Gomez says. "But if our taco shells are broken in transit or in the restaurants, we can't do anything with them. That was a big obstacle for us. How do we make these shells chip-like, but also be able to ship them and still be able to build a taco without having them break?"
Design (and manufacturing) is all about constraints.
