A story in the Wall Street Journal may sabotage your New Year's resolution. In some magically bizarre way it will make you hungry for a Jack-in-the-Box taco which San Diego and snow are the last best resort for crazy cravings. Listen to how they have been advertised. Can I get 99 tacos for two cents? We can't do that. I'm looking at the sign and it says 99 tacos for two cents. Dude it is to tacos for $.99. You are really going to eat 99 tacos were you? No. Yeah. The story is called Americans eat 550 my million Jack in the box tacos a year and nobody knows why. It went viral this week. Wall Street editor Russell Adams wrote the piece and joins me now. Welcome to the show. What led you to focus on the popularity of the Jack-in-the-Box taco? This is been something that has been bouncing around my head for quite a while. I grew up in San Diego and there was a Jack-in-the-Box right outside the baseball field of my high school and so I and my friends used to go there all the time often for tacos and then he just sort of became addicted to the tacos in spite of the fact that pretty much everything about them is gross I've lived in New York for 15 years so I'm nowhere near a Jack-in-the-Box that this is kind of always been in my head and I was recently thinking about doing one of the stories on the front page and I kind of wondered if my experience was still a fan -- thing and how popular the tacos were now and I asked around and talk to my brothers about their recollections of the tacos at Mayo Clinic come out the same way on them there they are irresistibly gross. It is described quite harshly by some of the people in your article. You can tell us about that because somebody called it cat food in an envelope. When I started looking around on social media for what people were thinking and saying about them I spent a lot of time on Twitter and came across this guy Mike Primavera that lives in Seattle and described the tacos as a wet envelope of cat food. I thought that was probably the best description I had ever heard so I got in touch with him and I talked to a couple of the other people who felt similarly but he was the best quote by fire. Also vile and amazing is one of the ways that the tacos are described. And yet people say they keep coming back for more. We able to synthesize why this item is so indescribably delectable? I guess -- is the one shortcoming of the story is that I never really answer that although I did talk to a restaurant to her in LA who is also in the story who has a restaurant called the nice guy which has tried to replicate the taco in sort of a higher end form. He said that it really is kind of the -- in some ways the perfect taco because it has this perfect mix of everything that you want. It's crunchy and also kind of soft and soggy at the same time and spicy and salty and it has all the tastes and textures mixed into this kind of one greasy thing that turns out to be pretty addicting. You give some great statistics about how many are sold each minute. It turns out 554 million works out to about a little over 1000 a minute which is pretty amazing especially when you consider that Jack-in-the-Box does not cover the whole country like Donald's or some of these other chains. The really are just in the western half of the US. Status a whole lot of tacos. I was trying to look for a comparison and the last time that McDonald's publicly tracked have any big Macs they sold was 10 years ago but in 2007 McDonald's told about the same amount of big Macs's Jack-in-the-Box cells tacos. That's amazing and it's the biggest seller on the Jack-in-the-Box many. For a burgers chain that is really saying something. You can't explain it away with that alone. What did they have to say about their taco. They were great about it. I had a conversation with some of the executives and their PR person leading up to the story and they know that these things are highly unusual but in a lot of ways the -- they are the chains best friend. Something that wasn't in the story was the marketing person that talk to me there said that this was sort of a marketers dream because they have not advertised -- I heard the clip that you played in they've developed this colt file -- following and they don't even need to tout it. Everybody who has ever been to a Jack-in-the-Box it seems knows about these things most of them love them in spite of a lot of things. Americans eat 554 million Jack in the box tacos a year and nobody knows why. The writer is Russell Adams and editor for the Wall Street Journal thank you so much.
A story in the Wall Street Journal about the number of Jack In The Box tacos Americans eat each year is becoming a viral sensation this week.
San Diego-based fast food chain Jack In The Box sells 554 million tacos each year. This is puzzling, wrote Russell Adams, an editor at the Wall Street Journal, because the tacos have been described by fans as both, "a wet envelope of cat food" and "vile and amazing". However, the tacos are so popular that even celebrities love them. In 2013, Selena Gomez posted a photo of her birthday cake, which was made out of Jack In The Box tacos, to Instagram. In fact, the tacos are often posted to social media.
Adams discusses some theories behind the popularity of Jack In The Box tacos Thursday on Midday Edition.
