FOUNDED: 1962 in Downey<\/p>\n
KEY OC DATE: Taco Bell relocated to Irvine from Torrance in 1976.<\/p>\n
LEGACY LEADERSHIP: Glen Bell\u2019s restaurant career began with a burger drive-in, but after seeing the demand for hard-shell tacos, he shifted his focus. After launching the first Taco Bell in 1962, he franchised the company and established a licensing model to scale the business. By 1978, he had grown the chain to nearly 900 stores and sold it to PepsiCo in a stock deal valued around $125M.<\/p>\n
OC SIGNIFICANCE: Taco Bell has grown into a worldwide brand and is one of the growth engines of its parent company, Yum Brands Inc. It is OC\u2019s largest restaurant chain with 2025 systemwide sales exceeding $18B.<\/p>\n
DEFINING MOMENT: Goes public with a total of 325 restaurants in 1970. Bought by PepsiCo in 1978.<\/p>\n
BY THE NUMBERS: 9,000+ worldwide locations<\/p>\n
QUOTABLE: \u201cCustomers are drawn to a store that is busy, growing, and changing for the better.\u201d \u2014 Glen Bell<\/p>\n
FUN FACTS: When Taco Bell launched the Doritos Locos Tacos, it became the most successful product launch in the brand\u2019s history, selling more than 100M tacos in its first 10 weeks. In January 2018, Nacho Fries surpassed that milestone as Taco Bell\u2019s biggest launch ever, selling more than 53M orders in its first five weeks.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"FOUNDED: 1962 in Downey KEY OC DATE: Taco Bell relocated to Irvine from Torrance in 1976. LEGACY LEADERSHIP:…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":379067,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[163,165,164],"class_list":["post-379066","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-anaheim","tag-anaheim","tag-anaheim-headlines","tag-anaheim-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/379066","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=379066"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/379066\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/379067"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=379066"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=379066"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=379066"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}