“You just have to wipe your mind of certain facts.” “There’s all these parameters around your creativity,” Carson said. She went on to pitch the company’s executives repeatedly on her idea-which would eventually become the Crunchwrap Supreme, the fastest-selling item in Taco Bell history-but, noting the extra seconds required for a worker to make the folds, they initially dismissed the concept. “She was in food operations, and she said there were all these technical reasons it wouldn’t work.” For one thing, Carson hadn’t cracked how to keep the folded hexagon from popping open. “I explained it to this gal on the treadmill next to me,” she said. After she proposed the idea to her Taco Bell colleagues, in 1995, she went to the company gym to work out.
Across the table from me, she put her iPhone on a sheet of paper and carefully folded the paper around it, to demonstrate.
“He came up with an idea how many times? He made so many tries.”Ĭarson realized that if a hard-shell tostada were placed inside a tortilla it could provide interior scaffolding. “It’s like Thomas Edison and the light bulb,” she said. She practiced the fold technique studiously. During her time at Taco Bell, she filled her lab book with sketches annotated with notes on the “build” of the potential hexagonal tortilla product, entering measurements of ingredients into a food-cost model. She started her career in the nineteen-seventies, working in the kitchen at Perino’s, an Italian restaurant in Hollywood frequented by movie stars, where she devised methods to reconstitute the company’s frozen entrées for the microwave age. Carson is seventy-three and wears glasses, pink lipstick, and a Timex watch.
“It was just something that came into my mind,” she said, seated in a booth at a Taco Bell in Orange County, California. She wanted people to be able to pick up the stuffed tortilla with one hand, even while driving, without it falling apart. For twenty-three years, when she worked for Taco Bell as a product developer, she thought and thought about how a tortilla might be wrapped around taco fillings in the shape of a hexagon.
“Life’s like an experiment to me,” she said. Lois Carson always wanted to find a new way to fold a tortilla.
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