Almost everyone loves ice cream. Vanilla, chocolate, strawberry, mint, etc. The list goes on and on. Ice cream is like people, it is varied and come in different flavors.
Tyler Malek is widely considered an ice cream savant. As the co-founder of Salt & Straw in Portland, Oregon, he has worked with flavors as varied as apple cider doughnut, bone marrow and something he called “culinary perfume.”
But in the spring of 2024, he thought he might have met his match. He was on a quest that proved surprisingly elusive: to revive and rebuild the Choco Taco, a childhood ice-cream-truck favorite created in 1983.
It wasn’t going well.
“I had closed myself in a room and spent months talking to everyone from Turkey to Germany to Poland to Vancouver, B.C., hunting this down,” he said. Over and over, ice cream equipment manufacturers told him it couldn’t be done.
A faux taco shell filled with ice cream doesn’t sound so complex. But Klondike, which stopped selling the Choco Taco in 2022, had made a few adjustments for the sake of mass production. The sugar cone shell was pliable rather than crunchy, to prevent shattering. Inside, a haphazard chocolate coating left plenty of places where ice cream touched cone, a recipe for sogginess.
“There’s a lot of ways to make an ice cream taco,” Malek said. “And very few compromises I was willing to make.”
He didn’t just want to resurrect the Choco Taco; he wanted to improve on it. His version would be a waffle cone with edges dipped in dark chocolate. It would be filled with a cinnamon ancho ice cream and sprinkled with puffed quinoa.
That July, a tip from a waffle cone equipment maker in Europe led to a video chat with a man in Poland. Malek immediately booked a plane ticket.
It took one border crossing, two factory tours and several conversations with Mariusz Goik, a co-founder of the manufacturing company Ice Group, for Malek to believe he just might pull it off.
“I would venture to say we’re the craziest people in the ice cream business right now,” Malek said.
The Salt & Straw team had been making a riff on the Choco Taco — called the Tacolate, for trademark reasons — since the days of Wiz Bang Bar, a soft-serve counter the company operated in downtown Portland from 2016 to 2020. Employees hand-painted chocolate shells and piped in ice cream one by one. Production maxed out at 50 a day.
When Unilever, Klondike’s parent company, announced it was discontinuing the Choco Taco, Salt & Straw halted ice cream production for a week to crank out as many bespoke Tacolates as possible as a tribute.
“It took all we had,” said Kim Malek, a co-founder and CEO (and Tyler Malek’s cousin). This enormous effort yielded just 500 tacos, which sold out in a matter of hours. There was demand but supply was the issue.
The Tacolate even caught the attention of Sean Tresvant, CEO of Taco Bell. (Tresvant shares a Portland connection: He was previously the chief marketing officer for Nike’s Jordan brand.)
In February 2024, the Tacolate surfaced at a Taco Bell event called Live Más Live, a showcase of upcoming projects. Leaked photos prompted excited speculation on social media. One problem: The equipment necessary to assemble a craft ice cream taco on any meaningful scale didn’t seem to exist.
Tyler Malek MacGyver-ed a production line out of existing machinery, but this required a lot of human intervention. Fingerprints appeared in the chocolate — unappetizing and ominous from a food safety standpoint.
After a week of tests, it was a no-go, Kim Malek said, “complete failure, face plant, heart-wrenching disaster.”
Then Tyler Malek found Goik.
Ice Group occupies the nichest of manufacturing niches. When consumers in Europe or Asia clamor for new ice cream novelties each year, Goik said, “We are a specialist for something strange and different.” He hadn’t worked with companies based in the United States before, since the time difference made customer service a challenge.
But, together, Malek and Goik got through the first and biggest challenge: how to bend a flat waffle cone round into a curved taco shape without its cracking.
Coating the ice cream — rather than the shell — in chocolate was an early breakthrough for containing moisture and keeping the shells crisp. “It’s critical — and maybe a little bit secret — how we manage that,” Goik said.
Next, an automated arm dips each confection in chocolate. This level of robotic dexterity wasn’t possible even a few years ago, Malek said.
If a factory produces ice cream sandwiches that vary slightly in height, Malek said, it’s not a huge deal, but fitting the Tacolate together requires great precision. “We have to be within half a millimeter on everything we do.”
And then there was the matter of culinary precision: Malek estimated that he tried 24 test batches before settling on puffed quinoa for crunch in place of traditional peanuts.
Salt & Straw invested more than $2 million in its custom manufacturing line, which has three robots and occupies a dedicated facility in northeast Portland. It can produce tens of thousands of Tacolates a day.
On Friday, Salt & Straw will unveil the products as a permanent menu item in the company’s 50 shops and online. Each Tacolate (about $7.50) comes with two dessert versions (mango jalapeño and wild-berry cinnamon) of Taco Bell’s signature hot sauce packets.
Taco Bell, a multinational chain, might seem an unlikely partner for a specialty Portland ice cream maker, but both companies have staked their brand on a dizzying stream of limited-time offerings and frequent collaborations. This is the rare Taco Bell project available only outside its restaurants (for now).
“There’s going to be a lot of watching and learning going on,” said Liz Matthews, Taco Bell’s chief food innovation officer. “We would love to see where this can take us, but you’ve got to remember our scale.”
And the scale is key. Bob Roberts, the head of food science department at Penn State University and director of the school’s influential course on making ice cream, pointed out: “The profit in it is in volume,” especially given the high cost of the specialty equipment.
Typically, Roberts said, European markets favor ice cream novelties, while consumers in the United States prefer scoops, pints and half gallons. For that to change, he said, “It’s people like Tyler and his crew that are going to lead the way.”
Allecia Vermillion wrote this article that originally appeared in The New York Times. Photos courtesy of Clayton Cotterell. Don Hughes added to this article.
