🌮 Taco Bell innovates more in six months than our industry does in six years

I read an article last week about Taco Bell’s new Cantina Chicken Mexican Pizza. It made me laugh. Then it made me think.

The same company that sells you a $1.99 taco has, in the last ten years, launched the Doritos Locos Taco, the Cheez-It Crunchwrap, Baja Blast Gelato, Crispy Chicken Nuggets, a Crème Brûlée Crunchwrap Slider, and a Caramel Apple Empanada revival from 1986. They did a Decades Menu. They did a Y2K menu. They sold out a Baja Blast Pie in two days. They hit $1 billion in operating profit in 2024, for the first time ever, while the rest of QSR cratered.

How? They rearrange the same handful of ingredients.

Beef. Beans. Cheese. Tortilla. Lettuce. Sauce. One social media commenter said it best: “Taco Bell been rearranging the same 10 ingredients for years.” Taco Bell agreed and turned it into a marketing campaign.

The playbook is simple. Limited time only. Create scarcity. Lean into nostalgia. Co-brand with Doritos, Cheez-It, Mountain Dew, Tajín. Let customers design their own items through Fan Style. Ship 20+ new products a year at an annual launch event. Kill the duds in 90 days. Bring back the winners. Same beef. New silhouette. New name. Sold.

They test dozens of product concepts a year. Most fail. The high failure rate is the filter the winners must pass through.

Now look at our industry.

In the last ten years, multifamily’s biggest “innovations” have been package lockers, keyless entry, an app to pay rent, and pickleball courts. Hotels did most of that before the iPhone. Really? That is the best we can do?

The poster child for multifamily innovation is AvalonBay. They have two brands people point to as proof the industry can ship something new. AVA, the smaller-unit brand for millennials. Kanso, the stripped-down brand for renters who want lower rent.

Look at what those products actually are. AVA: smaller units because construction costs in urban markets made the old AvalonBay unit impossible to build at the target rent. Kanso: fewer amenities because operating costs and CapEx made full-amenity buildings too expensive to deliver at the target rent.

A child running a lemonade stand could come up with both. Sell a smaller cup. Sell a cheaper drink with no straw. We call it innovation because the press release uses the word “reimagined.”

That’s the bar. Cost cutting wearing a costume. And AvalonBay is the company people hold up as the example.

I’m not pretending I’m better. I’ve tried.

I bought a class C apartment in Atlanta and wanted to separate it from every other class C across the street. So I bought 15 vintage 1980s and early 90s arcade games. Pac-Man, Galaga, Donkey Kong, a row of pinball machines, it was teh whole setup. Had a vendor install and service them. Kids were lined up outside before opening. It worked for marketing. The problem was the kids destroyed the machines faster than I could repair them. I shut it down.

Tried again to be creative. I’d seen outdoor fitness equipment trending in California, so I hired a specialized vendor, shipped the gear cross-country, ripped out an old tennis court, and built a beautiful outdoor gym with equipment rated for military use. Same property had a lot of unsupervised kids. They got creative. They destroyed the equipment in ways I didn’t think were physically possible.

Two swings, two strikeouts. The lesson isn’t that the ideas were bad. It’s that I didn’t push hard enough or test enough variations to find the version that worked. That’s on me.

But here’s the thing: I’m an owner of existing buildings. My innovation surface is small. Developers have a much bigger sandbox and they’re not using it. If a guy buying value-add deals in Atlanta is the one trying arcade games and outdoor gyms, where are the actual product inventors?

I don’t have the answer to what apartment innovation should look like. There are probably a hundred ideas nobody has tried because nobody in our industry has bothered to think them up. Rotating amenities. Subscription living. Unbundled pricing. Loyalty programs that travel with the resident. Resident co-creation. Fan-style anything. Some of those will fail. Most will fail. That’s how innovation works.

The deeper problem might be the people. Our industry pays well for being conventional. Acquire. Operate. Sell. Repeat. Creative people self-select into tech, design, media. The folks drawn to apartments are drawn to a stable, financially rewarding, low-creativity field. That’s a loop that feeds itself.

The best evidence: every genuine multifamily innovation of the last decade came from outsiders. Placemakr was founded by hospitality people. Landing by a tech founder. Common by a tech founder. The insiders renovated kitchens and called it value-add.

So where do you think the next real innovation comes from in multifamily? Not from the operator’s spreadsheet. From the resident’s life. And please don’t say AI.

Here is the link to the article: https://apple.news/Ar2L4nmsiQWm-YjE22lcxIw