Pitchwrap Supreme
The art of getting your stoner snack into the New York Times
The last time I remember being in a Taco Bell was in the late eighties, when I was a student at U.C. Santa Cruz. My buddy Darren1 and I had just completed a round of epic late-night bong rips at an off-campus house and the munchies had arrived as inevitably as the tide. The Taco Bell on Mission Street, around the corner, was open until the wee hours. As we waited in line, Darren slowly read the menu out loud:
“Nachos.
Nachos Bel Grande.
Burrito.
Burrito Supreme.
Burrito Supreme…with hair.”
I don’t remember if we actually ordered anything. Or, if we did, what it was. But it says something that the image of a Burrito Supreme with hair has been stuck in my head since 1989.
A lot of my college experience lay at the intersection of my friendship with Darren, our youthful love of the herb, and snacks.2 There was the time we dried some leaves from the plant in Darren’s room in an electric kettle (not recommended!), smoked it all and then bought every cookie in Sluggo’s, the dorm coffee shop. After dividing the cookies, we slunk back to our respective dorm rooms to devour our prey in solitude, like stoned leopards.
There was the time we roadtripped up to Berkeley to visit our high-school friend Bruno and made very special spaghetti sauce. I had a panic attack and was sure my heart was going to stop. If anything was going to stop my heart, it was the stoner dessert sandwiches we made out of soft wheat bread, sweetened condensed milk and chocolate chips. (Not recommended!)
And there was the time during sophomore year, when I lived off campus near Seabright Beach, when Darren, Bruno and I prepared for a big evening by raiding Day’s Market, the local bodega.
Me: [Drops two bags of Doritos3, two pints of Haagen Dazs and a package of Oreos on the checkout counter.]
Cashier: Smoking out tonight, huh?
Me [voice breaking]: Um…No?
Obviously, yes. We could have brought a four-foot mega-bong and an actual reggae band into Day’s Market and it would have been just another evening at work for the dude at the counter. That was Santa Cruz in the eighties.
Later we tried to sneak onto Seabright Beach after hours, high as B-52s and with me carrying a jingly bunch of Whippets in my jacket pocket. (Absolutely not recommended!) We were not the first geniuses to come up with this idea, and we only got a few steps down the beach before a cop pinned us in the light of his car and got on his loudspeaker:
“Get off the beach! You are going to jail!”
[Cork-squeaking sound of three idiots’ assholes clenching simultaneously.]
We were white college kids from Palo Alto, so we did not go to jail. We just got scolded and slouched back to my apartment, where we consoled ourselves with our bounty from Day’s Market.
Good times! But I haven’t really thought about Taco Bell since those days. I didn’t encounter them much during nearly two decades in Asia, though there were a few here and there. Asia was bad for Mexican food in general, though it had other culinary charms.
Today I live in Redwood City, which has a vigorous Latino community and is blessed with various Mexican provincial and Central and South American cuisines. We’ve embraced the liberal dream of a taco truck on every corner in the best way possible. For a while, a Salvadoran woman sold home-made pupusas from the yard of a duplex at the end of my block. They were great, and I’m crushed that she moved away.
Of course, Taco Bell isn’t “Mexican” any more than Panda Express is “Chinese.” It’s an American consumer fantasia, a confection of loose ideas and shapes that nod to an over-the-horizon heritage long ago remixed into drive-thru impressionism by industrial chefs. The only reason Mexicans work at our local Taco Bell is because immigrants hold up the entire Peninsula restaurant industry, from the fanciest venture capitalist watering holes in Palo Alto down to the roadside BBQ chicken cart that sets up near our local Costco.
So, let’s say you’re Taco Bell’s PR person, and you’ve just been given a mandate. That mandate is to get some press for the twentieth anniversary of the “Crunchwrap Supreme,” one of Taco Bell’s impressionist confections.
That’s hard! I mean, this is a wholly imaginary, rigorously engineered stoner snack designed to be as cheap and replicable as possible. It’s a mid quesadilla with a fancy fold. The starting point is, who gives a shit?
Well, someone absolutely nailed the assignment. Look at this presentation in the New York Times:
Following this splash are 1300 words, with several amazing photos, on how a bunch of hipster chefs have reinterpreted the Crunchwrap Supreme for their own restaurants. It’s an ouroboros of food culture, but, honestly, some of this stuff looks delicious.
OK, I can’t prove this story was pitched. But Luke Fortney, the author, is a Mexican-American journalist who has done a lot of food writing for various publications. If I were casting around for a reporter to pitch this to, he’d be a top-tier candidate.
Also, the angle is great! The focus is less on Taco Bell and the original than on innovative chefs who are reinterpreting the basic Crunchwrap template in creative and appetizing ways. Read this and tell me you’re not hungry:
At Cariñito, a pop-up taqueria in Manhattan, the owners David Verástegui and Joaquin de la Torre stuff Sichuan-spiced ground beef into a miniature Crunchywrap. At Kim Jong Grillin in Portland, Ore., the “Chopped” competitor Han Ly Hwang folds bulgogi and pickled banchan into a Munchwrap Extreme.
The chefs Oliver Poilevey and Marcos Ascencio bathe their Chingón Crunchwrap in buttermilk crema and chile de arbol salsa at Taqueria Chingón in Chicago. And Ali Elreda, the owner of Fatima’s Grill, fills his Crunch Wrap with chicken shawarma and Flamin’ Hot Cheetos at six locations of the restaurant across the country.
…
Kris Yenbamroong, an owner and the chef of Night + Market in Los Angeles, added a Thai Crunchwrap to his menu in 2023. Even before the rapper Action Bronson called it one of his “favorite things on Earth” last year, it was a hit: The restaurant sells as many as 20 wraps a night, and it’s not uncommon for a table of four to share two.
His Grapow Crunchwrap Supreme replaces the tostada with a fried wonton wrapper and the ground beef with pad grapow gai. These ingredients don’t appear together anywhere else on the Night + Market menu. But wrapped inside a flour tortilla, they make a whole lot of sense.
Sign me up for any of these! (I am writing this at lunch time and a bit hungry.) That’s also four paragraphs, each of which contains the word “Crunchwrap” or a very near approximation. The effect is to reflect all this innovation, and the aura of “14-hour pernil”, back on the original Crunchwrap Supreme, which is still a mass-produced fast-food snack. There is also a Taco Bell exec in the story, explaining why the company hasn’t sued the shit out of everybody:
It is nearly impossible to patent food recipes in the United States, allowing indie Crunchwraps not only to exist, but also to flourish. And while Taco Bell maintains a trademark on the name, it rarely enforces it when it comes to independent restaurant operators.
“Times have definitely changed,” said Liz Matthews, the chief food innovation officer for Taco Bell. “In the past, you would develop things and you would keep it secret and you would launch it.” Now, the imitations are essentially free advertising.
Yes, indeed. Especially in the context of this story. Also, suing a bunch local chefs and corner eateries out of business is extremely bad PR. Plus, if we’re being honest, the original “crunchwrap” is the Chinese jianbing (IYKYK), the origins of which allegedly date back to the three kingdoms.
Even if this story wasn’t pitched by Taco Bell, and the pitch was Mr. Fortney’s to the editors of the New York Times, sometimes good PR is making the most of the opportunities that come your way. And Taco Bell is good at PR. Two years ago, the New Yorker, America’s gold-plated maximum prestige magazine for tiresome coastal intellectuals (I’m a subscriber), produced a 5,000 word feature on the company’s “innovation kitchen.” The spine of the narrative is a history of the creation of the Crunchwrap Supreme, which the company obviously considers its magnum opus. I read that story when it came out. It was fascinating. Stories that take you behind the scenes of things you take for granted often are.
I’ve never been a natural at product PR. There’s a razzle-dazzle element that I struggle with, and I’m better suited to corporate reputation and issues management work. But when you come up in the agency world, you get all kinds of assignments. I helped launched Swanson Chicken Broth in South China back in 2007, when I lived in Shanghai. Chicken broth is an MSG and salt delivery mechanism that props up lots of Chinese cooking and is as much a commodity as soybeans or lumber. How do you persuade a bunch of aunties that some foreign brand is worth shelling out for? I recall we did a lot of work recruiting celebrity chefs and kitchen-god types who could advocate on blogs and in media appearances.
Also, it didn’t hurt that Swanson had come up with one of the better sinicizations of a western brand: 史云生 (Shǐyúnshēng).
史: shǐ (history)
云: yún (cloud)
生: shēng (fresh)
Buddy, 史云生 isn’t just soup in a box. It’s fucking tradition! Or, anyway, that was the story we told. It was in fact soup in a box. You work with what you’ve got.
Chicken broth wasn’t the least sexy thing I ever worked on. That was the General Insurance Association of Singapore, in my very first PR gig more than twenty years ago. Let’s not talk about that.
Less sexy than chicken broth, but infinitely more sexy than a bunch of insurance bosses, was packaging foam, which I worked on the same year as I was doing soup in a box.
You know when you buy a new TV or other appliance and it comes padded in a set of molded foam blocks? That’s packaging foam. Now, if you’re an undiscerning troglodyte, you might use common expanded polystyrene. (Often known as “Styrofoam”, though this is a branded version of extruded polystyrene produced by DuPont.) But there are fancier foams out there, including my then client’s product, and vicious battles are fought in the darkness to persuade big appliance makers to switch foams.
There are companies that think about nothing but packaging strategy. Something like 200 million televisions are sold each year. That means 200 million televisions are shipped each year, and each of them is some kind of protective packaging. The breakage rate is 1-2 percent, or 2-4 million sets, representing (back of the envelope) something like $1.5 billion in annual losses. That’s also lots of new TVs needlessly condemned to e-waste rather than fulfilling their god-given purpose to show Arrested Development reruns to stoners eating Crunchwrap Supremes.
And so a story takes shape. I said above that it’s interesting to go behind the scenes of things people take for granted. You can do that for packaging foam. And you can do that for food. And if you’re very, very clever, you can take people behind the scenes of products that aren’t yours, but that are inspired by yours, and spin a story that way. That’s what Taco Bell did. Slow clap!
Elsewhere in restaurant PR, here’s a Wall Street Journal story on how an operator of mass-casual restaurant chains plans to introduce AI into its business:
The company behind Applebee’s and IHOP plans to use artificial intelligence in its restaurants and behind the scenes to streamline operations and encourage repeat customers.
Dine Brands is adding AI-infused tech support for all of its franchisees, as well as an AI-powered “personalization engine” that helps restaurants offer customized deals to diners, said Chief Information Officer Justin Skelton.
Look, I work for a chipmaker and AI pays all my bills, so I’m all for talking it up. And this is a story pointed at investors, so there is no luscious food photography and you won’t feel hungry after you read it. But you will learn about this:
The company’s personalization engine, which also uses generative AI, automatically recommends new or additional items to customers based on their prior purchases and the purchases of diners similar to them, Skelton said.
This is just old-school collaborative filtering with an AI glow-up, right? But you can’t blame a company for trying, and I can’t think of a better target audience for this technology than the world’s munchie-tortured stoners:
Stoner: Um. Yeah. So, like, you know [giggles for twenty seconds] I’d like, um, a cheeseburger.
AI voice: Customers who ordered cheeseburgers also ordered…
[30 seconds of three blinking dots]
AI voice: FRIES!
Stoner:
AI voice: How many orders of [pause] FRIES [pause] would you like?
Stoner: Um, twelve?
Why not? After a night of epic bong rips, you can never have too many fries.
Not his real name. I changed Darren’s and Bruno’s names after sending the email version of this and experiencing a pang of regret. I’m fine outing my own youthful indiscretions, but should probably leave others out of it.
College-age me would be mind-blown to know how legal and accessible weed is in California in 2025, but grown-up me doesn’t smoke or take edibles and hasn’t really done so since the early nineties, when I was still in grad school. Yes, this is a note to my current employers.
Cool Ranch and Nacho Cheese, obvs.
This was really funny, and in some way I'm still thinking about, somehow deeply American. In a good way -- capitalist, creative, playful. A joie de vivre that seems missing from many scenes.
Yes, I seem to remember Zhuge Liang invented jianbing. That was in Red Cliff right?