Taco Bell's seafood salad is notorious for being one of fast food's most legendary flops. It made its first appearance in the 1980s (I was but a wee lad then), and in a blink — it was already gone forever. The thing didn't sound too bad, either.
At least not to me, because it was made with not only your typical taco salad ingredients (including lettuce, tomatoes, and black olives), it also had shrimp, a mix of whitefish, and snow crab. All these things were tucked into a large tortilla taco salad shell, the kind that's shaped like a large bowl. One of the commercials for the Taco Bell seafood salad takes clear aim at sandwiches like the Filet-O-Fish, in which the narrator says, "Why order fish, when it ends up looking like a burger?" So it's clear that Taco Bell wanted a piece of that seafood game, but the salad's destiny was ill-fated, as it was reportedly removed due to woefully low sales.
Consumer confidence in cold, fast food seafood wasn't exactly all that high, which is why products like this are still something we rarely see today. There were rumors of food poisoning from the seafood salad While documentation regarding these occurrences are scarce, it's been reported that Taco Bell's seafood salad was the cause of a few cases of food poisoning. This would have made things increasingly more difficult in terms of sales, because once a fast food chain is , that type of reputation's hard to shake.
Frankly, considering all of this, I'm surprised lasted as long as it did. .
