Taco Bell is not messing around with its five year plan to bring liquor to Americans and cheap Tex-Mex to the rest of the world.
The fine folks behind Taco Bell know that there are a ton of Taco Bells in the United States. Delightful locations for you to order Tex-Mex you’ll later regret and/or take your senior photos, if you must. Now, they want to add (more) alcohol to the mix. After dabbling in serving liquor over the past few years at about a dozen “cantina” locations, Taco Bell announced their intentions to bring that total to at least 300.
The aggressive push to offer cheap tapas and Baja Blast-related boozy drinks is all part of the company’s five year plan to reach $15 billion in annual sales by 2022. Cantinas, which may or may not require a bouncer, are just one part of the company’s attempt to build in city locations that can’t or won’t accommodate a drive-thru.
The cantinas, which Taco Bell calls “urban inline stores” in the press release, are currently operating in Chicago, Austin, Las Vegas, San Antonio and Berkeley, California. “Inline stores” that don’t sell alcohol are testing in San Francisco, New York and Atlanta as well.
That is, of course, not all Taco Bell has planned for the next five years. International markets are of extreme interest to the chain. India, Brazil, China and Canada will each get at least 100 Taco Bell locations on account of their “billions of people and strong youth culture.” (Buckle up, guys.)
Taco Bell also wants to ramp up their presence in Spain, Guatemala, South Korea and England while opening first-ever stores in Peru, Romania, Finland and Sri Lanka.
All in all, this comes out to about 2,500 new stores to bring Taco Bell’s global number to 9,000 locations by 2022.
That is a lot of Taco Bell.