Taco Bell Caramel Apple Empanada
The fried pastry pocket of diced apple and warm caramel that sat at the bottom of the Taco Bell value menu for 15 years. It debuted in 2004, sold for 99 cents for much of its run, vanished in 2019 with no real explanation, and got its own Change.org petitions before Taco Bell finally brought it back in November 2024.
The Caramel Apple Empanada was a hand pie: a fried pastry shell with a caramel-apple filling, sold for less than a dollar. Taco Bell put it on the Big Bell Value Menu in 2004, and reviewers at the time called it a "sexier, Mexier" answer to the McDonald's apple pie. It was the dessert you added because it cost 99 cents, and it stayed on the menu for 15 years.
Then it was gone. Taco Bell pulled the empanada in 2019 and never fully explained why. A spokesperson would only say that the empanadas "were a big hit but exited menus." Fans assumed it had been cleared out to make room for new items, and the removal set off petitions on Change.org asking for its return. A 2023 exchange on Twitter, in which T-Mobile answered Taco Bell's question about missed menu items with "Miss the caramel apple empanada," was enough to start comeback rumors on its own.
The comeback came on November 21, 2024, as the last entry on Taco Bell's Decades Menu, a set of five revived items each representing a decade of the chain's history: the '60s Tostada at $2.19, the '70s Green Sauce Burrito at $2.49, the '80s Meximelt and the '90s Gordita Supreme at $2.99, and, for the 2000s, the Caramel Apple Empanada, also at $2.99. Longtime fans grumbled about the price of a thing that once cost 99 cents. It reappeared on the Decades Y2K Menu in 2025.
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