TOP 10 LEADERS OF THE FRANCHISE 500

MEET THE LEADERS OF THE FRANCHISE 500

1. Taco Bell 

It's #1 for the third year in a row. What keeps the cravings so strong? The brand has mastered the risky art of being cool-by paying close attention to both outsiders and insiders.

by Nate Hopper

The Mexican Pizza was a goner. Or so Taco Bell thought.

It was 2020, and the pandemic had upended the food business. Like most restaurants, Taco Bell was busily simplifying the menu for the sake of a smaller restaurant staff. That's when executives zeroed in on the Mexican Pizza, a long- time menu item that was a bit of an outlier. It used several ingredients that no other product did. It took three or four minutes to make, while other items took just 30 seconds. Restaurants sold relatively few each day-at least, in comparison to thousands of tacos. "It was a cult product, but it wasn't a big product in terms of revenue," says Taco Bell CEO Mark King. The decision was painful but clear: Goodbye, Mexican Pizza.

Little did they know. "As soon as we took it off [the menu], we had all this noise," King recalls. One petition to save the Mexican Pizza quickly amassed 50,000 signees-and eventually accrued over 170,000. In the spring of 2021, the alluringly raunchy rapper-singer Doja Cat tweeted to her millions of followers, "I will do everything in my power to bring back the mexican pizza from taco bell." (And then, months later, somewhat more spicily: "I want my fuckin mexican pizza back @tacobell why u quiet.") Meanwhile, King's inbox was filling up. It's normally peppered with complaints about bad experiences at restaurants, but now he was getting twice as many messages, all hitting a single note: Bring back the Mexican Pizza.