Brace yourselves, Taco Bell fans: Desk lunches across the country are about to become a lot cheesier.
The Mexican fast food chain is partnering with the employee messaging service Slack to enable online orders through the platform. The ordering is limited so far: a handful of companies in Los Angeles have been beta testing the option for the last couple of weeks and are able to order from a curated menu of some of Taco Bell's most popular items. But this could be the first of several ways to order a Doritos locos taco straight from your office, says Lawrence Kim, Taco Bell's director of digital innovation.
"Obviously this could be the first of many different types of executions," he told USA TODAY. "A lot of these bots are scalable across different platforms." Meaning, "TacoBot," which is developed using artificial intelligence, could potentially be integrated with any number of messaging services in the future.
It works like this: users add "TacoBot" as a friend on Slack and can message directly with it to place orders and even pay. Invite your teammates to place a group order or keep all those crunchy tacos to yourself. Either way, the feature requires users to have an account on ta.co, Taco Bell's online and mobile ordering platform that launched in September.
Inspiration for the ordering service came from Taco Bell employees' own use of Slack, a communication tool marketed to companies as an email workaround — a way of doing everything from chatting in real time with colleagues and organizing group projects to sending GIFs and emojis.
"When we started figuring out that the majority of us are on this tool for 70 hours straight, we thought, what a cool way this would be to actually be able to order food and not just chat on this tool," Kim says.
So far, the service only allows for in-store pickup of orders, requiring companies that use it to be located near a Taco Bell store — there are more than 6,500 in the U.S. — but Kim says his team is testing a delivery option.
TacoBot joins the explosion of online and mobile ordering platforms satisfying mid-day hunger pangs and making eating lunch easier than ever. Uber recently launched UberEats, partnering with restaurants to deliver food in 10 U.S. cities using its established network of drivers, plus a new fleet of bike couriers in some areas. And Domino's has allowed pizza diehards to order by simply tweeting or texting the pizza emoji since last year.
While there are several Slack integrations that allow users to place food orders, such as one called Large that partners with companies like Instacart and Seamless to fulfill food delivery orders placed on Slack, Taco Bell appears to be the first independent restaurant to offer a similar service.
"Digital innovation has really been a core focus of the brand," Kim says. "What we really try to do is ultimately provide more accessibility where our consumers are."
Follow Hadley Malcolm on Twitter @hadleypdxdc.
