When Taco Bell announced the arrival of its current limited-time-offering, the 7-Layer Nacho Fries (which are only going to be around for a few more days, so get cracking!), the press release quietly snuck in the news that its guacamole recipe had been changed. Gone was the stuff straight from the bag, replaced with a new version that’s made in-house daily. This seemed like big news to us, but so far, there hasn’t been much chatter about it on the internet—and there’s a reason why.
“Taco Bell’s new, creamy guacamole is made with real Hass avocados, freshly prepared daily, featuring tomatoes and crisp onions added to every batch,” read the press release from Taco Bell, which also noted that the revamped guacamole is vegan. As, you know, the vast majority of guacamole is.
Is this new-and-improved guacamole a permanent change to the Taco Bell menu? We reached out to Taco Bell for confirmation.
“It is indeed permanent,” responded a spokesperson via email.
I sampled the new guacamole for myself (alongside the return of my beloved Enchirito, which has sadly already gone away again), and truthfully, it doesn’t taste much different from the old stuff. It features chunks of onions and tomatoes, but still has that highly pulverized, slightly grainy texture to it that lets you know it was indeed a whole avocado once. Ultimately, this guac still somehow tastes like it came out of a bag. Why would that be?
The press release’s description of the new recipe says the guac is “freshly prepared daily.” It does not say “prepared with fresh ingredients.” Sure enough, this Reddit thread asks how the stuff is actually made, and someone who claims to be a Taco Bell employee had an answer that confirmed my initial suspicions:
“We use a bag of avacado pulp, with a bag of quagamole [sic] seasoning and 2 blue cups of tomatoes and 1 cup of onions, stir tf out of it,” they wrote.
So, if this Reddit user is to be believed, the most important stuff, the avocado pulp, does come straight from a bag. The tomatoes and onions come from the food assembly station, and the seasoning comes from yet another bag. That’s why no one’s really discussing the recipe change—because, aside from mixing in some tomatoes and onions, it hasn’t actually changed too much.
Further online investigation reveals this video, which appears to corroborate the Reddit user’s description right down to the color of the cup.
In what appears to be a Taco Bell kitchen, the subject of the video assembles the guacamole by scooping two cups of tomatoes and one cup of onion from the food assembly line using a little blue cup. They then open a plastic bag of avocado pulp and a bag of what looks almost like a mayo-based dressing (vaguely Caesar-looking) and vigorously stir the mixture until everything is combined.
It’s no Chipotle guacamole, which is made with only fresh ingredients at each location. But I realize we’re talking about Taco Bell here, and the scale of its operation is something else entirely. Knowing that the guacamole is made this way won’t stop me from enjoying it, adding it to my Crunchwrap or Burrito Supreme at a slight upcharge. But if I hadn’t read about the new formulation myself, I wouldn’t even have known anything had changed. Because it mostly hasn’t.
