Taco Bell is selling a $3.99 Choco Taco with a Salt & Straw label — and the label is the product

You remember the Choco Taco. Everyone over 30 remembers the Choco Taco: the ice cream truck, the dollar bill, the waffle shell that shattered into your lap, the fudge ripple that was mostly ripple. Klondike discontinued it in July 2022 after nearly 40 years, and the internet reacted the way it reacts to everything now, which is with a petition. Unilever did not bring it back. What came back instead is a version with better ingredients, a fancier pedigree and a price that has roughly quadrupled, sold by the company that sells you a Crunchwrap at 1 a.m.

Taco Bell and Salt & Straw launched the Churro Ice Cream Taco nationwide on Tuesday, September 1. Suggested price is $3.99, though plenty of stores are charging $4.99, and one reviewer paid $5.40 after tax. It is available only in the restaurant or the drive-thru, not the app, limited to five per order, for a limited time, while supplies last. Every one of those phrases is doing work.

What you're actually eating

A waffle cone pressed into a taco shape, filled with a new churro ice cream (cinnamon, sugar, a fried-dough note), then the open edge is dipped in a dark chocolate-flavoured coating and sprinkled with puffed rice. The puffed rice is the tell. It is a Salt & Straw signature, a texture idea from a company that built its reputation on ice cream with things in it, and it is the only part of this product that could not have come out of a Klondike test kitchen in 1995.

The first review out, from Tasting Table, liked the ice cream and the chocolate and did not like the shell: "soft" rather than crisp, without the snap of a real waffle cone, with the puffed rice adding very little. That is the eternal problem of the ice cream taco. A cone that is crisp at the factory has to survive a freezer, a truck, a store freezer, a drive-thru window and your dashboard. The original Choco Taco solved it by being sold frozen solid out of a truck. A restaurant that keeps its freezer at soft-serve temperatures has a harder job, and the shell is where you will notice.

How a Portland scoop shop ended up at the drive-thru

Salt & Straw is the Portland, Oregon chain founded in 2011 by cousins Kim and Tyler Malek, known for flavours like pear and blue cheese, honey lavender and, every Thanksgiving, a turkey-and-stuffing situation that people queue for. It runs a few dozen scoop shops, mostly on the West Coast, where a single scoop runs north of $6 and a pint sells for around $13. It is, in other words, the opposite of Taco Bell, which is the point.

The two companies first tried this in summer 2024 with the Cinnamon Ancho Tacolate: a hand-pressed cone, chile-cinnamon ice cream, chocolate, toasted rice, sold at seven Taco Bell locations and the Disney parks. That was the test. This is the rollout, to roughly 8,000 restaurants. Alongside it, Taco Bell's Live Más Café locations in California, Las Vegas, Houston and Dallas are selling a Salt & Straw Choco-Waffle Chiller, a blended cup of vanilla base, churro crumbles and waffle-cone pieces in a chocolate shell, from $4.69. On September 8 the app is running a one-hour sweepstakes for 100 branded coolers, each holding three tacos, which tells you how much of this is about the taco and how much is about the app.

Why the label costs $2

Do the math on a frozen dessert at a quick-service chain. A cinnamon soft-serve or a frozen novelty costs the operator well under a dollar to serve. The Churro Ice Cream Taco is a manufactured item shipped frozen, so call it a dollar to a dollar-fifty landed, which is still an enviable margin at $3.99 and an absurd one at $4.99. Ice cream is the highest-margin thing on almost any menu, which is exactly why every chain from coffee shops to bars has been adding it this year.

The Salt & Straw name is what makes $4.99 feel like a deal rather than a gouge. You are not buying a novelty bar; you are buying a taste of the $13 pint for a third of the price, in a drive-thru, in Tulsa, where the nearest Salt & Straw is a thousand miles away. That is a genuinely good trade for the customer in Tulsa. It is a better one for the two companies: Taco Bell gets a dessert with a story, and Salt & Straw gets its logo in front of more people in a week than walk through its shops in a year.

Whether that trade is good for Salt & Straw's brand long term is the interesting question. Premium ice cream sells scarcity and craft. Eight thousand drive-thrus sell neither. The 2024 test was a boutique flex; this is a licensing deal, and licensing deals are how a brand goes from beloved to everywhere to, eventually, ordinary. Ask anyone who remembers when Häagen-Dazs was the fancy one.

Should you buy one

Yes, once, at $3.99, and eat it in the parking lot before the shell goes any softer than it already is. Ask the price before you order, because the "suggested" price is a suggestion the franchisee is free to ignore, and a dollar on a $4 item is 25%. If your store wants $4.99, know that you are paying a Salt & Straw-branded premium for a product Salt & Straw did not scoop. If you want the actual scoop-shop experience, a real pint at a real shop is a better use of $13 than three of these.

And if you just miss the Choco Taco, the honest answer is that this is not it. The original was cheaper, crunchier and dumber, and it was better for all three reasons. What Taco Bell is selling is a very good idea from 1983 with a 2026 marketing budget stapled to the wrapper.

Klondike killed a $1.50 ice cream taco because it wasn't worth the freezer space. Taco Bell brought it back at $4.99 and sold out the first week. The freezer space didn't change. The label did.