Taco Bell Breakfast: War With McDonald’s Heats Up

The Taco Bell breakfast has already been outpacing sales at competitor McDonald’s, and now the Mexican food chain is taking direct aim at the Golden Arches.

In a new advertising campaign promoting its Waffle Taco, Taco Bell is directly calling out its fast food competitor. One advertisement features a man who has been eating the McDonald’s Egg McMuffin for the last 30 years, but decides to trim his mullet and get a smartphone after trying the Taco Bell breakfast menu for the first time.

In case viewers didn’t understand the point, the commercial is set to the tune of the song “Old MacDonald Had A Farm.”

In another ad for the Taco Bell breakfast menu, 25 men around the country named Ronald McDonald give their reasons for loving Taco Bell’s new menu.

Taco Bell admits that the efforts aimed at McDonald’s are intended to shake things up.

“The message is we’re here to stay in breakfast,” said Taco Bell’s chief marketing officer Chris Brandt. “The whole reason we’re doing this is we just thought breakfast was really boring and so we wanted to break up the boring, shake up the routine.”

McDonald’s has responded to the Taco Bell breakfast menu, posting an image on social media showing Ronald McDonald kneeling to pet a Taco Bell Chihuahua with the words “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.”

McDonald’s initially responded to the Taco Bell breakfast push by offering free coffee to customers, and now their strategy has moved on to the next step. This week the fast food chain unveiled a marketing campaign pushing the McGriddles breakfast sandwiches.

The new advertising campaign pushes the McGriddles as an integral way to start the day, and an online promotion shows a series of situations with the tag line “Once you get a McGriddles, you’ll get it.”

But the efforts may not be making much of a dent yet. Estimates have the Taco Bell breakfast menu outselling McDonalds through the first few weeks of its introduction.