What’s great about the Choco Taco isn’t just the combination of ingredients. After all, there’s roughly a thousand different ways you could combine vanilla ice cream, fudge, chocolate sauce, peanuts, and a waffle cone. Walk into any ice cream parlor, and you’ll get a dozen different variants on just those flavors alone. No, the magic comes from one stupid little innovation: Forcing it all into a taco-shaped assemblage. Whereas the traditional cone requires you to slowly eat your way down into the waffle cone, slowly losing other flavors as you go, the Choco Taco gives you everything at once. It’s genius, if genius can be quantified by the effectiveness of tweaking dessert flavors into a taco shape, which it can, 100 percent.
So let’s celebrate the Choco Taco by meeting the man behind it, Alan Drazen. As Eater’s “First Person” video series interview with him demonstrates, he’s everything you’d want him to be—which is to say, a massive nerd. Along with giving the less exciting history of how he came up with it (essentially sitting in an office and wondering, “Hey, what if you…”) and the minutiae of getting his product into Taco Bells nationwide, he sings the “official” Choco Taco theme song, which to the surprise of absolutely no one, is just “La Cucaracha” repurposed for his ice cream treat. Although we’re not sure he gave the lyrics the kind of vetting they maybe deserve, because lines like, “crunchy nuts beyond compare” are just way too ripe for double entendre potential.
Still, we doff our hats to you, Alan Drazen. Your invention has brought us joy, and presumable early-onset diabetes, which we will honor by eating another Choco Taco.