By Todd DePastino
Today, reading the Military Times, I learned that the fast-food chain Taco Bell is named after the founder, Glen Bell. I also learned that Glen Bell started cooking for large groups in the Marine Corps in World War II.
Glen Bell spent most of the war in a kitchen. He cooked all day every day under a system where waste wasn’t tolerated, orders moved fast, and you fed a lot of people the same thing, the same way, without cutting corners. Bell would later say that Marine training taught him portioning, cleanliness, speed, and the expectation that food comes out right no matter how busy things get. After the war, he ended up serving food in walk-up stands and drive-through windows, but the basic principles stayed the same.
Bell was born in 1923 in Lynwood, California, into a family without much money and plenty of work to do. The Depression shaped him. His father chased construction jobs, and the family moved constantly. Glen sold apples, eggs, flowers, anything he could. As a teenager he rode rail cars and took odd jobs around the West. It was as hard scrabble a childhood as you can imagine.
Broke, Bell enlisted in the Marines in 1943. They put him in a kitchen. It wasn’t glamorous, but it carried responsibility. Meals have to be hot, on time, and consistent. Marines complain about plenty, but no one wants complaints about food. Bell ran stoves, counted ingredients, cleaned stations, and met the same standard day after day. He learned how to improvise when the system broke down and how important chow was to morale. When he left the Marine Corps in 1946, he carried with him habits he couldn’t shake: work fast, stay clean, watch portions, keep people fed.
Back in California, he took factory and yard jobs for a while but didn’t stay long. Food felt like his future. In 1948, he opened Bell’s Drive-In selling hot dogs. Two years later he opened another, this time adding hamburgers to the menu. Business was steady, but Southern California was already crowded with burger joints. Bell watched customers across the street line up for something different: crispy tacos filled with beef, lettuce, and cheese from a family-run place called the Mitla Café. He ate there often and asked a lot of questions. Eventually the owners let him into the kitchen and showed him how they made their tacos. Bell paid attention. Here was food that people waited for—fast, cheap, loaded with flavor.
Bell didn’t try to reinvent the taco. He was looking speed up and scale up its production. He experimented with shell fryers, ingredients, and workflow, to serve tacos hot and fast, like burgers. In 1951 he began selling tacos out of his stand for nineteen cents apiece.
He sold his burger stands and focused on tacos. In the mid-1950s he opened Taco Tia, then later co-founded another small chain called El Taco. Both grew, but Bell wanted control and a brand he could expand without partners holding the wheel. In 1962, he opened a little stucco walk-up shop in Downey, California, with a new name: Taco Bell. The building was juts a kitchen and service window, no seating. But the tacos were good, cheap, and fast. Customers lined up just like Bell hoped they would.
Taco Bell didn’t explode overnight, but it grew steadily. In 1964 he sold his first franchise. Two years later, stores appeared outside California. By decade’s end the chain numbered in the hundreds. Bell didn’t dress the food up as authentic Mexican cuisine. It meant to be California fast food shaped by Mexican-American flavors.
The business went public in 1969, and by 1978, Taco Bell had 868 restaurants. That year Bell sold the company to PepsiCo for around $125 million in stock and stepped back from day-to-day control. He stayed interested in business and agriculture, but his most lasting work was already done. He had taken the humble taco, something most Americans had never heard of, and made it a household item.
Bell died in 2010 at age 86, and his ashes were sprinkled in Torrance, California. Debra Lee Baldwin wrote his biography,
