US vs Australia Taco Bell | Food Wars | Insider Food

From exclusive items to portion sizes, we wanted to see all the differences between Taco Bell in the US and Australia. This is Food Wars. At Taco Bell in Australia, you can order tacos in the units of one taco or two tacos, also known as the Double Taco Supreme. Our tacos in the US come in orders of one, three, or a 12 taco party pack. Here is our cheesy burrito. Okay, I got a beefy melt burrito, which kind of looks similar and we're going to measure it now. It measures Okay, so this is about si

x inches. And the girth. We're gonna have to get a little crafty to measure the girth. So now let's measure this little piece of paper to see what the girth is. The amount of times I've said that word. The girth is seven inches. So that's actually seven inches, which is the same as Australia. Very cool. Now let's see how much our burrito weighs. Here is our Crunchwrap Supreme. The length is 6.5 inches. 6.25, I would say. Australia's really beating us with these portion sizes. And what about the

drinks? In Australia, they come in the following sizes: regular and large. In the US, Taco Bell drinks come in three sizes: Small, medium, and large. Let's measure them. Here's everything that you can get at a Taco Bell in Australia that you can't find in the US. And here's everything you can get at Taco Bell in the US that you won't be able to find in Australia. We're gonna break these down into categories and go through them all starting with the Australian burritos. We have a Jalapeño Crunch

Burrito, a Chipotle Crunch Burrito, and a Boss Burrito. Now I'm really intrigued to try all these because I have never tried them before. So I'm gonna start off with the Jalapeño Crunch Burrito. Ooh, ooh, packed with jalapeños I can see. So you got some rice, jalapeños, beef. Yep, you've got some sauce on it, and tomato. That's really hot. I know it looks like I'm in a lot of pain right now, but the pain is good because it's actually a really delicious burrito. Here are our exclusive burritos. L

et's start with the Cheesy Double Beef Burrito. I'm gonna take a bite of this. This is what it looks like on the inside. They didn't come this way. We sliced them in half. Everything that I would want in a Taco Bell taco just in a burrito form. It's very good. So in this burrito we have some rice. It looks like there's tomatoes and a healthy portion of the ground beef. There are something called fiesta strips in here, which I think are fried strips of tortilla that are dyed red. I see something

red in here, but it looks totally like melted so maybe like all of the moisture just kind of made them soft and not crunchy anymore, but it still tastes really good. Now we shall try the Chipotle Crunch Burrito. We've got some little tortilla chips, I presume. Just like an artificial cheese taste. Bit of a smoky flavor to it. I don't like that. Next we have the Chicken Enchilada Burrito, which I've never had this before. This sounds yummy. I'm not a fan. Not a fan of that one. It's really salty,

like too salty. Now we're gonna move on to the Boss Burrito. I wonder why they call it the boss, maybe because it weighs about a kilogram. Oh, we've got some guacamole. It's OK. The toasted meat is a bit more predominant than this. It's a lot more gamey. And these are the Grilled Cheese Burritos. So we have ground beef, chicken, and steak. So this one isn't grilled and this one is grilled. Do you see that burnt cheese on the outside? It's a little too much for me. It's like such an overwhelming

amount of cheese that I think it's like crossing a line, but, like, burnt cheese always tastes good to me. So it's not like it tastes bad, it's just too much. We also have some burrito options that are technically exclusives, but they look very similar to some American options. So Australia has two burrito options, a Grilled Stuffed Burrito and a Beefy Cheesy Burrito. Nico, do these look similar to your Grilled Cheese Burrito and your Beefy Milk Burrito? Yes, we do have the Grilled Cheese Burri

to, which we just talked about, but we don't have the Beefy Melt Burrito. Stuff just seems to disappear off the Taco Bell menu all the time, it's very odd. The main difference is ours comes with sour cream and fiesta strips. We have a decent amount of exclusive tacos here in the US. So we have the Spicy Potato Soft Taco. Apparently Taco Bell has a lot of vegetarian options, so I'm guessing that's what that is. I was like, who is ordering a potato taco? Vegetarians, duh. Let's see what this taste

s like. The seasoning on the potatoes is really good. They're very flavorful. I don't mind this. Next we have the Doritos Locos and the Doritos Locos Supreme, which is my personal favorite thing to order at Taco Bell and I think it's Jo's too. It's just so good. Whoever had the idea to make a shell out of an existing delicious chip, genius, that is so smart. The Doritos Locos Tacos get this special little sleeve that says Doritos Locos on it. The only difference between a regular taco and a supr

eme version of a taco at Taco Bell is the addition of tomatoes and sour cream, which I prefer. I want it on the taco. Next we have the Doritos Cheesy Gordita Crunch. This one has that special Doritos shell. Next we have the Chalupa Supreme. And last but not least, we have the Black Bean Chalupa Supreme. I think presentation is like at the bottom of Taco Bell's list of priorities. The food usually tastes OK to just really, really good, but it looks like garbage most of the time. Don't get too hun

g up on what this all looks like. Also, if you're gonna get Taco Bell, just eat it immediately because if you let it sit for too long, your tacos will actually disintegrate. We only have one exclusive specialty item, which is the Lava Crispy Chicken Taco. Inside, you can see there's some lettuce, crispy chicken, I believe that's been like deep fried crispy chicken, some cheese, shredded cheese, tomato. It's slightly mild, mildly spicy, but nothing unbearable. I think it's a nice chicken taco. So

on the Taco Bell website, there is a section of their menu labeled specialties and some of them are only found in the US like the Mexican pizza, which I've never had before. I don't think I've ever seen one before and I have to say I'm very underwhelmed. They were dropped from the menu back in 2020 in an effort to declutter the menu. This was met with a huge public outcry and even Doja Cat got involved with asking Taco Bell to bring it back. After two years, the item returned to Taco Bell's per

manent menu in September 2022. This looks like a Lunchables meal. Like it doesn't look like real food to me. It's actually a little unbelievable to me that people wanted this back so badly, but maybe it tastes better than it looks. Let's see. So this is the regular Mexican pizza with ground beef and this is the vegetarian version. So no beef, no nothing. It doesn't taste awful but it doesn't taste good. Not to me. I don't know what Mexican pizza sauce is either. They're just like adding the word

Mexican in front of stuff a lot. I'm assuming that it just has the seasonings that you would find in like taco meat. I don't think I have to tell you that nothing that we've eaten today feels like authentic Mexican food. And also under the specialties menu is the Black Bean Crunchwrap Supreme. Our next exclusive item is the Stacked Hot Chips. Now stay with me here. OK in Australia, chips are what you guys call fries. Unless we're talking about tortilla chips, which are also called chips. Nachos

are not considered chips. It's super straightforward, right? Hot chip is basically a fry, so it's a hot chip. Our Stacked Hot Chips are chips but loaded with nacho toppings, including a protein, salsa, guac, sour cream, and a cheese sauce. So the fries are one of those things that disappears and reappears on the Taco Bell menu all the time. Today, they were unavailable, but maybe we'll find them again someday. Now we're onto the sides that you can find only in the US I believe. We have black be

ans, black beans and rice, Cheesy Fiesta Potatoes and pintos and cheese, which I'm not gonna say this looks bad but I know you're thinking it. For sides in Australia, we only have two options: Seasoned Hot Chips and Seasoned Tortilla Chips. Our potato chips have a Mexican seasoning. We managed to figure out what it was. It's now time for sauce talk. Sauce talk. So here we have like the traditional Taco Bell sauce packets. We have mild, hot, Fire and Diablo. They always give you so many sauces at

Taco Bell. They're pretty good though. I actually feel like there's not much flavor difference between them, but the heat level definitely changes. Hot is the best one 'cause these, it's like, Diablo especially sometimes, it just makes food inedible to me. Next we have chipotle sauce, avocado ranch. I believe this is the spicy ranch. It's got a lot of colors in it. No! And I believe this is the red sauce, the enchilada sauce. I've never had any of these that come in the black containers but I'v

e gone through plenty of Taco Bell hot sauce packets. A lot. Our Australian sauce options are a chipotle mayo, a zesty ranch, and a Fiesta salsa. I'm gonna try them all and see what the go is. Chipotle mayo's nice. Now the zesty ranch, are you zesty? I would definitely say the zesty ranch has a citrusy flavor to it. The Fiesta salsa looks like the party is all done. There was no spice to the salsa. We have a couple of dessert options you won't find in the US. We have churros and a Chocodilla, wh

ich I presume is a chocolate-filled-style quesadilla. Let's give this a try. It almost verges on the dark chocolate side, which I'm not the biggest fan of dark chocolate. Let's have a look at these churros. Look at all the sugar that is on this. This is the closest to a really good churro that I've had like since I was in Disneyland. Moving on to sweets, all we had available at our Taco Bell were these Cinnabon Delights, which are kind of like little donut holes filled with a cream cheese frosti

ng. They're very delicious. If you can believe it, our Taco Bell did not have the Cinnamon Twists but they are available at other locations. I don't know why they didn't have them at ours, but they're still a thing on the menu. We just couldn't get them. I've had the Cinnamon Twists before. They have like a good cinnamon-sugar coating on them, but the actual twist itself does not taste that good. Yeah, these taste way better than the Cinnamon Twists, get these. These are the exclusive drinks tha

t Australia has. We have a Pepsi Max, a Solo, Sunkist, 7Up, Phoenix Lemon Bitters, a Phoenix Traditional lemonade, a Phoenix ginger beer, Lipton peach ice tea, and an Ice Break iced coffee that was unavailable. A Solo is basically like a lemonade. Lemon, lime, and bitters is an Australian classic that's been around for hundreds of years and that has like a lemon flavor to it. It's got a bitter flavor as well from the Angostura bitters. So it's just a perfect combination and what we have discover

ed was this was created to soothe seasickness. Plus we also have some alcoholic options available at some locations, including frozen margarita, Corona and localized beers. However, they have not been made available yet in our state. And here are all of the exclusive drinks in the US. So we have Pepsi Zero Sugar, cherry Pepsi, Mountain Dew Zero Sugar. We have Baja Blast, which I'm so shocked that they don't have in Australia. It's so quintessentially Taco Bell. Baja Blasts, they go hand in hand.

Then we have Starry. This is G2, which is some kind of Gatorade, strawberry lemonade, Brisk Mango Fiesta. And then we have Brisk Dragon Paradise, which I don't know what that means. I was guessing dragon fruit. So Star used to be, I believe, Sierra Mist. I don't remember what Sierra Mist tastes like. Like lemon lime, it's just a lemon-lime fizzy drink. A soda. A lemon-lime soda. Yeah, it tastes exactly like Sprite. I do wanna try G2. Don't know what that is. This tastes like a Pixy Stick. That'

s so bizarre. The blue Pixy Stick is exactly what this tastes like. It's basically like a diet version of Gatorade. Okay, I really wanna try this Brisk Mango Fiesta. That was actually really good. It's a little too sweet for me but the mango flavor is really tasty. And then we have the Brisk Dragon Paradise, which has blackberry, raspberry, and dragon fruit in it. Oh no, that tastes like I'm drinking hand soap. That's not good. This tastes like fabric softener. I don't know what it is, it tastes

like fizzy fabric softener. So Taco Bell in the US actually has a pretty extensive breakfast menu. I've never had it before, I've never woken up and just craved Taco Bell breakfast, but let's start by talking about all of the breakfast burritos. So here we have the Cheesy Toasted Breakfast Burritos. There's a bacon, sausage, and potato, which sounds very interesting to me. Alright, let's see what the potato one tastes like. It's not bad. I think that I mostly like this but I'm not really feelin

g the cheese sauce. It's a really overwhelming flavor but the potatoes are really, really yummy. And on this side, we have the Grande Toasted Breakfast Burritos. We assume that these are the grande ones because they are significantly larger than the other ones. So we have steak, sausage, and bacon. I kind of... hmm, hmm. Let's go bacon, let's go bacon. Let's see what it tastes like. Dry, it's so dry. Tastes good, like the flavor's good 'cause I mostly taste bacon. So the Cheesy Toasted Burritos

don't have potato in all of them. There is a potato option that does have potatoes in it, but all of them do not contain potatoes whereas the Grande Toasted Breakfast Burritos all have potatoes in them. Moving on to the quesadillas, we have a sausage, bacon, and a steak option. I wanna try the sausage. They're a little cold, so they're not very melty anymore, but here's what this looks like. They do come precut sometimes. Cheese pull. Well, nope, it's not happening. OK let's try the sausage ques

adilla. I don't mind that. I don't know if it's something in their cheese or just what is going on today, it tastes like a little bit off. I can't put my finger on it and I like Taco Bell tacos. I've had their cheese before, I know what it tastes like. We also have three options for breakfast Crunchwraps. There is the California, the bacon, and the sausage. In all of the breakfast Crunchwraps, you'll find egg, cheese, and a full hash brown in the center. This is the California Crunchwrap. So the

California Crunchwrap has guacamole in it, which makes it California-themed. It tastes really good. Whatever they did to it tastes really yummy. There's little bits of chopped up bacon in here. I didn't really get any, so I don't think it's just evenly dispersed but this is a really good flavor. I actually would order this. I'm also gonna try the bacon one because there's jalapeño sauce in the bacon and the sausage, I believe. That jalapeño sauce does not taste good to me. It's like a shot of c

umin into the mouth. It's insane. This would be so good if it didn't have that sauce. We also have a very, very greasy little hash brown. This is soaked, it's soaked through the paper. So here's what half of the hash brown looks like at Taco Bell. Oh, this is so greasy, I'm gonna be sick. Taste like a premade hash brown. Not bad, not great. The Australian Crunchwrap Supreme combo comes in at 14.95, so that's around $9.89. In this, you'll get a Crunchwrap, regular fries, and a regular drink. A Cr

unchwrap Supreme combo comes out to $8.29, or 12.87 Australian. For that, you get a Crunchwrap, a Crunch Taco, and a large drink. That's a 32% decrease in price in the US. The biggest single menu item on Australian Taco Bell menu is the Boss Burrito box. For 23.95 or $15.70, you get a Boss Burrito, a Crunchy Taco, regular chips, churros, and a regular drink. We also have box options. Our biggest is currently the deluxe Build Your Own Craving box where we get a choice of a specialty item like a C

heesy Gordita Crunch or a Grilled Steak Cheese Burrito, two classic items, a side, and a drink. All of that comes out to $9.49 or 14.73 Australian. If you were to get a similar order in Australia, it would come out to 24.80 Australian or $15.78. I do find that the the prices are more expensive in Australia. I would say that Taco Bell is definitely on the cheaper end of the spectrum when it comes to fast food in the US. I feel like the prices haven't changed astronomically from when I was younger

, whereas other fast food places here, the prices have jumped a lot. So thanks Taco Bell for staying relatively cheap. I have never eaten at Taco Bell before. I know, shock, horror, but Taco Bell isn't as popular in Australia as I know it to be over in the States. There's not many Taco Bells around. Taco Bell, I think, is starting to build some more franchises here but it's not that popular. We have some really great Mexican food in Australia, like Mexican fast-food chains here already. In 2018,

Taco Bell shared an explosive growth plan to open several franchises in Australia. They failed to capture the Australian market in 1980 and again in 2005. This expansion plan was for 50 stores but to date, they've only opened 40. I don't think Taco Bell is a true representation of the Mexican cuisine. I think it is a Western interpretation of maybe their palate and like what they would like. Taco Bell's not authentic Mexican food. I don't feel like I have to say that. They've kind of created th

is brand image that feels a little stereotypical. Do you guys remember those chihuahua Taco Bell commercials? Like, yeah, that little dog was cute, but come on. The commercials are really... They're cringe, I don't know how else to say it, they're like kind of embarrassing now. I think in the US, Taco Bell has like a really strong cult following. The people who love Taco Bell love Taco Bell. They have their go-to order. They definitely get Baja Blasts. So as much as I don't think it's everyone's

favorite fast food here, it definitely has a decent amount of people who absolutely love it. For me, it's one of those things that I only get after, like, drinking. I'm never like in the mood for it is the thing. It kind of just happens. Taco Bill's is a fast-food Mexican restaurant in Australia that sued Taco Bell, claiming the brand was too similar and wanted to block it from operating in Victoria. I have never heard of Taco Bill's in my life. I didn't even know that was a thing. I feel like

that would be the Wish version of Taco Bell. I've never heard of it, maybe it only operates in Victoria. If anyone's watching this and has eaten at Taco Bill's, is it any good? Taco Bell might be late to the party in Australia, which has several established Mexican restaurant chains to compete with. The most popular chain is Zambrero with 229 locations. Other chains like Guzman and Gomez and Mad Max are also well established. Also, I have to add in, Guzman and Gomez is really, really good. That

would be, in my opinion, one of the best fast-food Mexican restaurants that we have here. But also, what is Zambrero? I know that it's apparently meant to be the most popular but I don't even know what Zambrero is. Unfortunately, because Taco Bell is pretty new in Australia, they say that they haven't gathered enough information to accurately represent the nutritional info of their food. In the US, a Taco Bell Crunchy Taco has 170 calories, a Crunchwrap Supreme contains 540 calories. Currently t

here is no publicly available ingredient information for Taco Bell in Australia. All we have is an allergens list. Australia, if you thought that was gonna spare you from getting roasted, think again. The Australia allergens list refers to shredded cheese as cheese angel hair. What's up with that? Why are you calling it that? Also, according to our allergens list, several items including our seasoned ground beef, our nacho cheese sauce, our Zesty ranch sauce, and many more may contain shellfish.

The website says that this is because they are manufactured or produced in the vicinity of this allergen, but we still found the idea of fishy beef funny. So is there anything that you should be on the lookout for with Taco Bell's ingredients in the US? One thing to note from the Taco Bell menu is the use of yellow five food coloring in the Doritos Locos Taco shell, and also in the Mountain Dew Baja Blast. It's not gonna stop me from ordering either of those if I'm being so honest. Lucky for us

, neither the Dorito Taco Locos nor the Baja Blast are available at our restaurants. In the UK, yellow five is on a list of six food colors, which when added to foods must contain the following warning: may have an adverse effect... This is what's happening to me in real time right now. In the UK, yellow five is on the list of six food colorings which, when added to foods must contain the following warning: may have an adverse effect on activity and attention in children. A 2015 study also found

that it had a significant genotoxic effect and that prolonged exposure could cause cancer. Can we get some dancing rats on the screen please? The FDA also says that it may cause itching and hives in some people. I have a story to tell you right now. This is a real thing on the Taco Bell website under the Mango Fiesta drink page. It says, there ain't no party like a mango party. No, seriously, I have a friend who went to it last year and apparently the whole thing takes place in a five-story man

go tree. The Brisk Mango Fiesta sure knows how to throw a rager. The Secret Basement Club is where the real party is at for those who are in the know. Allegedly, last year was so crazy that the people who run the Mango Fiesta found a bunch of party stragglers stuck in a homemade nest in the branches almost two months after the party. What is going on? Like they were... No one knows how they got there, but they developed a whole diet and economy based on mango fruit and leaves living off Brisk Ma

ngo Fiesta. They were bumming Wifi off the people at the base of the tree and selling artisan tree-barked dinnerware sets online. Seriously, that fiesta is bananas, or I guess mangoes, and scene.