Taco Bell Makes Exciting Changes To Its Value Menu

We all know that fast food, once known for being affordable, isn't so cheap anymore. Depending on how you order, sometimes your bill can balloon to a pretty pricey total if you fail to take advantage of value meals. Taco Bell recently announced that it has revamped its Cravings Value Menu featuring 10 items all priced at $3 and under. You'll find some notable items and old favorites on that list.

There are six new additions to Taco Bell's Cravings Value Menu. Here they are:

• Double Stacked Taco ($1.99): A Crunchy Taco shell filled with seasoned beef, lettuce, cheddar cheese, and fiesta strips, wrapped up in a soft tortilla with nacho cheese sauce
• Stacker ($2.19): Seasoned beef, a three cheese blend, and nacho cheese, folded up into a soft flour tortilla
• Cheesy Double Beef Burrito ($2.79): A double portion of seasoned beef, seasoned rice, fiesta strips, three cheese blend, nacho cheese, and sour cream, wrapped in a flour tortilla
• 3-Cheese Chicken Flatbread Melt ($2.29): Grilled chicken, chipotle sauce, and three cheese blend, folded and melted into flatbread
• Chicken Enchilada Burrito ($2.49): Grilled chicken, seasoned rice, red sauce, three cheese blend, sour cream, in a flour tortilla
• Loaded Beef Nachos ($2.99): Nachos with seasoned beef, beans, nacho cheese, red sauce, sour cream, and guacamole

These items will join four items from the existing menu, all of which are vegetarian: The Cheesy Roll Up ($1.19), Spicy Potato Soft Taco ($1.29), Cheesy Bean & Rice Burrito ($1.49), and Cheesy Fiesta Potatoes ($2.49). As always, prices and participation may vary.

While most of the items on the Cravings Value Menu are iterations of Taco Bell's typical offerings such as burritos and melts, two particular items stand out: the Double Stacked Taco and the Loaded Beef Nachos.

The Double Stacked Taco might just scratch the itch for Taco Bell's discontinued Double Decker Taco, which was revived for just a few weeks as a limited-time menu item last year. The crunchy taco shell wrapped in a soft tortilla gives you bites of contrasting soft and crisp textures simultaneously. The key difference is that the Double Decker's refried beans are eschewed here in favor of nacho cheese.

That being said, Taco Bell has previously had Double Stacked Tacos on the menu, like back in 2016—but they came in novel flavors such as Cool Habanero, Spicy Sweet, and Nacho Crunch.

The other new item of note is the Loaded Beef Nachos, because these are the only other nacho offering than the Nachos BellGrande, whose price is one of the highest (if not the actual highest) on the menu. Our local Taco Bell offers the Nachos BellGrande for an eye-watering $7.79, and it was removed as a free food reward from the app last year. So a nacho offering on the value menu is a nice compromise. (The former value nacho options were the Nachos Supreme, which were a smaller version of the Nachos BellGrande, and the Triple Layer Nachos, both of which have been long discontinued.)

The revamped menu comes at a price, unfortunately. Two of my personal favorite former value menu items have been removed permanently: the Chipotle Ranch Grilled Chicken Burrito and the Fiesta Veggie Burrito. What Taco Bell giveth, it also taketh away, but I'm particularly miffed about the removal of the Fiesta Veggie Burrito—that leaves us with the Cheesy Bean & Rice Burrito as the only veggie value burrito.

Still, what's good is that the new Cravings Value Menu runs the gamut between tacos, burritos, nachos, and novelty items like the 3-Cheese Flatbread Melt and the Stacker. Will this improved value menu at Taco Bell signal the return of better value menus at other fast food chains? One can only hope.