The next move for Taco Bell after shaking off that pesky lawsuit? The company has allowed a BusinessWeek reporter to work the line and write a story about what it's like to be behind the drive-thru at a Tustin Taco Bell.
The article also has Taco Bell CEO Greg Creed, formerly of the detergent and personal-products division at Unilever, summing it up nicely, “I think at Unilever, we had five factories. Well, at Taco Bell today, I've got 6,000 factories, many of them running 24 hours a day.”
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It's a good and revealing read. Some of the revelations: employees are called either “Service Champions” or “Food Champions.” Under the Food Champion designation, there are subcategories of Steamers, Stuffers and Expeditors, the labels given to those who have their workdays boiled down to a specific task so they take as few footsteps as possible during a shift.
The most dreaded order? The Crunchwrap Supreme–the chain's most complex, time-intensive foodstuff to prepare. A typical employee already has a lot to juggle. The best workers have the 78-item menu memorized and can produce 100 tacos, chalupas, gorditas and burritos in less than 30 minutes, the article states.
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Before becoming an award-winning restaurant critic for OC Weekly in 2007, Edwin Goei went by the alias “elmomonster” on his blog Monster Munching, in which he once wrote a whole review in haiku.