The Ultimate Ranking Of Taco Bell's Best Seller Menu Items

Ever since Taco Bell first chimed back in 1962, it's become a staple in the fast food ecosystem. This American fast food favorite has become known for its creative menu items, bestowing the world with Mountain Dew Baja Blast, and encouraging its customers to Live Más. With a solid foundation of crowd-pleasing items that have solidified its presence on the fast food scene, Taco Bell's menu has plenty of bang for its buck.

While the haul of a Taco Bell run varies widely from person to person — our Taco Bell orders are deeply personal, after all — the "Best Seller" section of the restaurant's menu includes its most popular items. After perusing Taco Bell's best seller list, it became evident that an ultimate ranking needed to take place. These items are the best of the best, so it's time to assemble the ultimate ranking of everything on the Taco Bell best seller menu.

It wasn't until Taco Bell perfected its Nacho Fries that it really proved its potato prowess. While Nacho Fries were so popular that they've enjoyed an extra long limited time run, the spicy potato soft taco doesn't quite hit the same levels of awesomeness. If this vegetarian menu item packed a Nacho Fry punch, its ranking would increase considerably. As it is now, with its muted flavors and conflicting textures, it's coming in at dead last.

While there are some benefits to the Spicy Potato Soft Taco — it's cheap and vegetarian — it comes up woefully short when compared to the other items on the best seller list. The main offender in this soft taco is its dryness. The taco does have a creamy chipotle sauce which adds a bit of moisture along with the shredded lettuce, but the starchy potatoes and the starchy tortilla end up becoming an overly chewy mess once it comes together in your mouth. Adding a few hot sauce packets to the taco helps a lot, as does ordering it with extra chipotle sauce, but none of those tweaks are enough to help it rank higher.

Though Taco Bell's crunchy tacos are what put the restaurant on the map, they're honestly not that great by today's standards. Though they are extremely cheap, making a bag of tacos one of the more cost-effective fast food indulgences on the market, you do get what you pay for here. There is something to be said of the crunchy taco shell's texture as it does work well with the seasoned beef, shredded lettuce, and cheese, but a Crunchy Taco from Taco Bell is achingly mediocre, even on a good day. Perhaps this is why crunchy tacos aren't typically found on the menus of traditional Mexican restaurants.

The main issue here is that you only have a precious window of about five minutes before the seasoned beef soaks into the shell and compromises the taco's structural integrity. Waiting longer than this results in a wrapper full of shattered taco shell that you end up having to eat like nachos. If you're particularly unlucky, this unfortunate series of events will take place mid-bite, causing the taco fillings to spill all over your favorite shirt.

Taco Bell's Soft Taco solves the Crunchy Taco's structural issues, which makes it decidedly less of a pain to eat. Considering that Soft Tacos and Crunchy Tacos are the same price, it's easy to decide which version ends up in my bag. Soft Tacos are superior to Crunchy Tacos on any day of the week, but they're still a bit bland when compared to other items on this list.

Where the Spicy Potato Soft Taco fails with its filling and the Crunchy Taco fails with its exterior, the Soft Taco succeeds — that's a win right there. However, once those initial obstacles have been overcome, you're left with a fairly simple combination of ingredients. You've got the seasoned beef — which does contain beef, regardless of what the haters say — providing the backbone of the dish, a bit of shredded cheese, and a smattering of shredded iceberg lettuce. It's true that these ingredients are all one needs to make a taco, and a taco's ingenuity exists because of its simplicity, but fast food fans simply cannot live on Soft Tacos alone.

There aren't a whole lot of dessert options at Taco Bell (and the less we say about Baja Blast gelato, the better), but the Cinnamon Twists have always been a decent sweet treat. They're extremely cheap, have a great airy texture, and complement most everything on the Taco Bell menu quite well. That said, they are a bit of a one-trick pony and kind of make you wish they were churros.

A bag of Taco Bell Cinnamon Twists definitely gets the job done if you're looking to satisfy your sweet tooth with an economical, vegetarian, and low-calorie snack. It's the puffed corn texture that is the star of the show here — Cinnamon Twists are like if the lightest, crunchiest Cheeto merged with a liberal dusting of cinnamon and sugar. The spiral shape helps all that sweetness make it to every bite, and it's amazing how fast a bag of these will simply disappear if you eat them inattentively. Taco Bell's best dessert award definitely goes to the Cinnabon Delights, but the Cinnamon Twists are a safe bet when you're craving something lighter.

Love it or hate it, the Crunchwrap Supreme may be the Taco Bell menu item that perfectly encapsulates the brand itself. Its spectacular presentation and relatively cheap ingredient list has also placed the item on the list of fast food items that have gotten the home chef glow-up. This monstrosity does its level best to combine every possible flavor and texture on the Taco Bell menu into one massive pinwheel. It's a success for the most part, but it does tend to get a little tripped up by its own composition.

For starters, I respect that the Crunchwrap Supreme eats like a burger. I've tried to eat this thing with one hand before and it never turns out pretty. When you can prop yourself up on two elbows and truly commit to the Crunchwrap Supreme, each bite is like a track from the "Flavors of Taco Bell" playlist. One bite is a bit meatier and cheesier, while another bite might cool things off with a pocket of sour cream. One more bite will include a modest crunch reminding you that, yes, there is a tostada shell somewhere in the mix. It does happen to be one of the more expensive items on the list, but when you consider this thing's sheer girth, the price tag is closely aligned with what you get.

Comparing the Chalupa Supreme to a Taco Bell Crunchy Taco is a lot like comparing a Maserati to a Buick. Though the lettuce, cheese, and seasoned beef are the same, the "supreme" designation means you get sour cream and tomatoes. It's all housed within Taco Bell's trademark Chalupa shell, which is structurally reliable and possessed of a great crispy-but-chewy texture. The formula was greatly improved with the limited time Cheesy Street Chalupas, but the original Chalupa Supreme has a lot going for it — for a taco, anyway.

The Chalupa Supreme gets a lot of mileage out of its extra toppings as sour cream and tomatoes are only going to make any taco better. Its most impressive characteristic is its thicker, chewier shell, however. Texturally, this adds a lot to the party, and it honestly tastes better than the soft tortilla and the crunchy shell. There's a flavor profile here that is most comparable to fry bread — it's got an oily, deep-fried carb flavor that is honestly pretty tasty. Of course, with all these fancy upgrades, you're looking at a price tag that is much higher than that of a regular taco, which may be the biggest problem with the Chalupa Supreme.

While it took me a few Taco Bell trips to truly understand the Cheesy Bean and Rice Burrito, it's quickly become one of the items that I most often use to fill out my order. If you roll up to a Taco Bell without much of a game plan, this decently-sized burrito is a great way to take advantage of the restaurant's penchant for cheap, tasty, and filling eats.

Despite the fact that Taco Bell is a Mexican restaurant, rice only shows up in a handful of its menu items. It's a shame, because the rice at Taco Bell takes its flavor cues from the classic Mexican red rice (arroz rojo), and it's used to impressive effect here. The rice adds some heft to the burrito's interior, and the beans and cheese add some moisture and additional saltiness making this another win for Taco Bell's vegetarian menu. The fluffiness of the rice on this burrito is also consistent — there's nothing worse than having a few underdone grains of rice show up in a burrito, but Taco Bell's rice rarely has that problem.

Nachos aren't usually part of my starting lineup when I visit Taco Bell, which is mostly because they are really hard to eat while driving. However, when I fancy things up a bit and eat my meal at the restaurant or at home, I have to have some Nachos BellGrande. This is a dish that makes the most of Taco Bell's lovely nacho cheese sauce which has definitely taken Chowhound's tip about melting nacho cheese to heart.

There isn't anything particularly special about Taco Bell's tortilla chips, but they improve considerably when doused with seasoned beef, sour cream, refried beans, nacho cheese, and sliced tomatoes. There are some purists who will turn their nose up when a soggy tortilla turns up in the grand guaca-melee of nacho jazz, but let's be realistic, people. You eat the crunchy chips at the edge by hand, and then find a fork to scoop up the chips that have become absorbed by the toppings. It all becomes a glorious mishmash of flavors and textures that nets this dish a spot in the top five.

When the Double Decker Taco arrived on Taco Bell menus in 1995, it was a fast food milestone. Essentially, the Double Decker Taco walked so the Cheesy Gordita Crunch could run. A hybrid of Taco Bell's Gordita and Crunchy Taco, the Cheesy Gordita Crunch uses a blanket of melted cheese to adhere the soft Gordita flatbread to the taco proper. While it is on the pricier side of Taco Bell's menu, you can't deny the soft-meets-crunchy appeal of this item.

Like the Chalupa shell's improvement on the Crunchy Taco Shell, the Gordita flatbread is a vast improvement over the Soft Taco's flour tortilla. It's softer, heftier, and it just happens to sing when you combine it with the crispy crunch of a taco shell. In between the two you get a decent shot of cheesy goodness which preps the palate for the foundational seasoned beef. While the Crunchwrap Supreme represents the more extreme side of Taco Bell's proclivity to stuff one menu item into another, the Cheesy Gordita Crunch represents the more elegant alternative.

Taco Bell has made good use of its panini press over the years, but few menu items have come as close to perfection as the Chicken Quesadilla. Sure, we all have fond memories of the Grilled Stuft Burrito and we've come to adore our Crunchwraps, but neither of them have come close to the Chicken Quesadilla's level of deliciousness.

Maybe it has something to do with the fact that it's the only Taco Bell menu item that encourages you to rip through its wrapper, but this guy is always at the core of my Taco Bell run. The Chicken Quesadilla is so successful because it's a simple assembly of ingredients that go really well with one another. Its slices of grilled chicken are meaty enough to add flavor and heft, and the creamy jalapeño sauce adds just the right amount of kick. With all of that goodness stuffed into an extra large tortilla that gets nice and toasted in the grill. Not only does having it sliced into quarters make it feel like a pizza, but it makes it easy to dip this into some additional guacamole or sour cream.

Though I do miss Taco Bell's Seven Layer Burrito, I have to admit that ditching two of those layers and adding seasoned beef gave us one of Taco Bell's greatest creations. It's number one on the list because it features an excessive use of the restaurant's tastiest ingredients. You've got the beef, some sour cream, beans, sour cream, shredded cheese, and nacho cheese sauce. It's not often to see both shredded cheese and nacho cheese on a Taco Bell menu item, but it's a delightful combination.

Taco Bell is at its best when it folds multiple flavors and textures together like the Crunchwrap or the Cheesy Gordita Crunch. Most of the time, this practice results in menu items that are greater than the sum of their parts. But few items have struck the balance of flavors that you get in a Beefy 5-Layer Burrito. Every layer supports and complements each other layer, creating a hefty burrito that feels priced correctly for what you get.

In order to properly rank the items on Taco Bell's best seller list, I had to consider a variety of different factors. Obviously if an item is on the best seller list, it's got some real popular appeal. With that in mind, I started by rating each item on its individual flavor. The items on the lower end of the list were fairly one-note in their flavor profiles where the items that ranked higher had more variety going on.

More often than not, the tastier items climbed the ranks because their ingredients maintained a nice balance with one another. Taco Bell has become well-known for taking its existing pantry and recombining those ingredients into new items. It's a proven strategy that has created some of the restaurant's most memorable items, but there are definitely some items that do this better than others.

As Taco Bell has also become synonymous with an economical menu, I thought it was important to factor each item's price in the ranking. I ranked some items a bit lower since I felt they were perhaps too expensive for what you get, so the items at the top of the list were also there because of their price point.