First Contact

Part 2

On July 31, 2008, I had lunch with Barbara C., longtime PR person for Del Taco, at the Foothill Ranch location of Del Taco, which is near their corporate offices just over the city border in Lake Forest. This was a nice little business lunch where we talked about my blog and about Del Taco stuff.

Near the end of the meal Barbara asked me, "If you could change anything about the Del Taco menu what would you do?" Well, obviously this was the perfect lead-in to mention my idea so I said, "Del Taco really needs to bring back Naugles items. People have not forgotten about them and it would be a popular thing."

When Barbara learned this she leaned back in her chair, thought about it for a minute, then said, "Yeah, that's actually a good idea. I'm going to take that back to the marketing people." We talked about it for a bit and I told her my idea that Del Taco could put out an extra little menu board that showed a few Naugles items that customers could order. That was about the extent of my ambition at that time.

Barbara did mention that Del Taco still sells the Naugles bun taco as an off-menu item (meaning that they have a button for it on their cash register but don't visibly display it on their menu board) and I went about a week later to a Del Taco in Irvine and found that indeed the bun taco can be ordered there. However, as with the Macho items that Del Taco sells, the bun taco at Del Taco has been 100% extricated from its history as a Naugles item. (I will add that somebody reported that the bun taco was actually originally a Del Taco item. If so, it would've been available at Del Taco in the 1960's and/or 1970 so that Naugles would have then used it on its own menu beginning in late 1970. But at some point in time Del Taco stopped openly selling it and people now seem to mostly remember it as a Naugles item.)

A few days later I received an e-mail from Barbara letting me know that Del Taco marketing wanted to meet with me to discuss some ideas. Of course I told her that I'd be willing to do that. From my perspective it looked like things were finally starting to happen. Barbara said that she would get back to me when she could arrange a meeting time. About a month went by and she wrote back and said they were still hoping to have the meeting. So I waited some more.

And waited some more.

And waited some more...

And waited for almost a year...

Then in May 2009 I was told: "it doesn't look like we'll be able to schedule [this] until the second week of June."

Over two weeks later I wrote and asked, "Did [this] get held off some more?

The response: "Yes, I'm sorry.... perhaps in about two weeks?"

And then I never heard from them again.

Then on September 28, 2009, I sent one more communication to them about it:

Hi Barbara,

I don't know if you ever presented the idea of bringing a Naugles sub-menu back to the Del Taco marketing team but people are still very interested in it. I normally get 30 - 40 hits a day from people looking for Naugles info but at this point today it has already well exceeded that amount due to links in comments left on an entry at Nancy's blog. With the nostalgia factor that is driving business so heavily at places like Bob's Big Boy and Farrell's this could be a huge selling point for Del Taco and would require little in the way of new ingredients needing to be stocked or whatever. Nancy's story on Jack in the Box bringing back a 30-yr. old burger has itself been getting a ton of traffic and was the #1 most viewed story on the Register website for a while.

Trying not to be a pest over this but my blog is the one spot where interest in Naugles can be gaged and I can tell that it is high. If it's out of the question then it's out of the question but I'd hate to see Del Taco miss an easy and profitable opportunity with public interest already so acute in a property Del already owns.

Christian

I think we could say that I tried my hardest to get this idea to work with Del Taco.