For those wondering if there’s a Taco Bell floating restaurant, the answer is yes—though the word “floating” is doing a lot of work here.
The concept of a so-called floating restaurant, branded as Taco Bell Defy, was launched on June 7, 2022, billed by the fast food restaurant on its website as “one of its most innovative Taco Bell restaurant designs yet.”
It’s located at 5931 94th Ave N., in Brooklyn Park, Minn., a suburb in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area, simply known as “the Cities” to Minnesota residents and the Twin Cities to the wider world. It’s a drive-thru-only restaurant, open 24 hours.
This is what it looked like, according to a CCX Media Community News video, upon opening.
A Taco Bell rep, responding to the Daily Dot’s question about how many Taco Bell Defys have opened, noted, “Taco Bell Defy is only at the Brooklyn Park location and it’s still open and going strong.”
Why is it being called the Taco Bell floating restaurant?
Taco Bell Defy is being widely dubbed a “floating restaurant” because of its two-story design, with the kitchen and staff housed in a second-story structure, with four drive-thru lanes below at ground level.
As a CNN story on Taco Bell Defy noted, “Orders are delivered via a ‘vertical lift’ to customers. There’s a designated lane for people ordering on their apps, a lane specifically for delivery drivers, and then two lanes for conventional drive-thru customers.
Though more Taco Bell Defys haven’t joined the original, Taco Bell hinted in that release announcing it that it could be a harbinger of the future. As the press release on the website boasted, “From digital check-in screens for mobile order customers’ unique QR codes, to a two-way audio and video technology service for customers to talk to team members on the second floor, Taco Bell Defy boasts many features that could show up in future Taco Bell restaurants in the US.”
“In the meantime, and in partnership with long-time franchisee Border Foods,” it added, “the teams are considering potential retrofits that could be made to several of Taco Bell Defy’s neighboring restaurants.”
The food elevators Taco Bell Defy uses to transport food, as Food and Wine noted, was an innovation cooked up “not only as a way to speed up service, but also to set Taco Bell apart from other fast food brands.”
The Border Foods team was facing challenges with streamlining the journey from order to meal hand-off, and the Vertical Works team presented a solution to not only address this, but also deliver a more impactful customer experience overall,” explained Vertical Works co-founder Mike Strommen.
How fast does Taco Bell think they can get?
According to Mike Grams, the Taco Bell President and Global COO quoted in the release, “Taco Bell Defy is an incredible innovation for our brand, and one that’s meeting our consumer in a really unique way. For decades we’ve been committed to providing a fast, safe and friendly drive-thru experience; now with our bold goal of creating a 2 minute or less drive-thru experience for customers of this concept, Taco Bell Defy is the future.”
A 2021 article from QSR showed that Taco Bell was already the fastest among 10 major U.S. fast food chains, clocking in at 268 seconds from entry to exit, figuring in results from 312 different drive-thru locations across the U.S. That was four seconds faster than second-place KFC, and a full 4 1/2 minutes faster than the slowest of them all, Chick-fil-A.