With Lyft, a stop at Taco Bell is no problem
Taco Bell has, quite literally, found a new marketing vehicle, and its name is Lyft.
The fast-food chain is beginning a venture with the ride-sharing company this week that will allow Lyft passengers to request rides that incorporate stops at Taco Bell drive-thrus between 9 p.m. and 2 a.m.
The companies will test the option, which will appear as “Taco Mode” in the Lyft app, during the next two weeks around a Newport Beach, Calif.,, location, with plans to expand the program nationally next year.
It is an attempt to tap into the trend of young people increasingly carpooling through apps like Lyft and its larger rival Uber, particularly on nights out with friends. While Taco Bell offers delivery to customers and advertises the locations of its restaurants through the navigation app Waze, partnering with a ride-sharing company represents a new type of “experience innovation,” said Marisa Thalberg, Taco Bell’s chief mar- keting officer.
“I kind of think of this like inverse delivery — like we’re delivering you to Taco Bell,” she said in an interview. “You’re being delivered to the food as opposed to having to get in your own car and drive.”
As it stands, Lyft and Uber do not have stated policies about how drivers should handle passenger requests to swing by fastfood drive-thrus, though the question regularly pops up in online discussion forums for drivers.
“Several times I said no to food, and they ask why, and I explained what the last idiot did of making a mess and each time the present idiot would promise to not make a mess, spill, waste, etc., then they do it anyway!” one Uber driver wrote in an online forum.
Thalberg said her company had seen “a bunch of funny tweets” and other social media posts from hungry passengers on the topic, which got them thinking about a potential partnership with Lyft.
“Some people are either afraid to ask or don’t know if they can ask,” Thalberg said. “We’re taking all those question marks of, ‘Would it be unseemly to ask my Lyft driver to go through the Taco Bell drive-thru?’ And now we’re not only going to make it permissible, we’re going to celebrate this behavior.”