Taco Bell is expanding Live Más Café into Indianapolis, Las Vegas, and additional Southern California markets while launching a four-drink horchata lineup, signaling how seriously the QSR chain is pressing its specialty beverage ambitions ahead of a stated $5 billion beverage sales goal by 2030.
The four new drinks — Purple Horchata Chiller, Chocolate Horchata Cold Brew Float, Strawberry Horchata Refresca, and Vanilla Spiced Horchata Refresca — went live October 15 at Live Más Café locations, each priced between $4.19 and $5.29 depending on size and format. The lineup draws on Mexican horchata's creamy, cinnamon-vanilla profile, then extends it across frozen, coffee, and fruit-forward beverage categories. On December 10, three of those drinks — plus a new Vanilla Spiced Horchata Freeze — will expand to Taco Bell restaurants nationwide on a limited-time basis, giving the concept its clearest pipeline-to-system strategy yet.
The Expansion Blueprint
The geographic growth reflects a deliberate multi-format approach. In Las Vegas, Taco Bell is partnering with franchise operator Diversified Restaurant Group to open a standalone flagship inside a shipping container adjacent to the existing Las Vegas Taco Bell Cantina at 3717 S Las Vegas Blvd. The location will carry 20-plus specialty beverages alongside Vegas-exclusive alcoholic creations and location-only merchandise — a high-visibility testbed for what a destination beverage experience can look like under the Taco Bell umbrella. In Indianapolis, Live Más Café enters the market with three locations: two company-owned and one operated by KMAC Enterprises, a new franchise development partner. The first opens October 22 in West Lafayette, with Greenfield and Muncie to follow before year-end. Southern California, where the concept originated, gets additional Cafés at Century City Mall, Irvine, and Tustin.
Beverage Sales at Stake
The operational case for Live Más Café is coming into clearer focus. The concept has now sold approximately 1.3 million beverages across its 39 locations, with breakfast and afternoon emerging as the strongest dayparts — a meaningful finding for operators thinking about traffic distribution and labor scheduling. The best-selling beverage launch in Live Más Café history was the You Seem Pretty Pink for a Baja Blast, a data point that illustrates how novelty and familiar brand equity can coexist in a specialty beverage program. "Our fans have always loved our beverages, and the response to Live Más Café has shown us they're craving even more," said Liz Matthews, Global Chief Food Innovation Officer at Taco Bell. "We're ready to take it even further with bold new drinks and more ways for fans to experience Live Más Café." The brand has introduced nearly two dozen beverage innovations since Live Más Café launched, using the concept as a controlled test environment before deciding what graduates to the broader system.
For restaurant operators tracking the QSR beverage arms race, the Live Más Café model offers a useful case study: a branded sub-concept that functions as both a standalone unit and a product development engine feeding the parent chain's national menu. Taco Bell is also signaling international ambitions, noting it is exploring how beverage learnings could apply globally as the brand expands overseas. Operators and franchisees watching the beverage-forward restaurant trend will want to track how the Indianapolis and Las Vegas units perform in terms of transaction growth and daypart lift — metrics Taco Bell says have already trended favorably at existing Café locations.
Written by Michael Politz, Author of Guide to Restaurant Success: The Proven Process for Starting Any Restaurant Business From Scratch to Success (ISBN: 978-1-119-66896-1), Founder of Food & Beverage Magazine, the leading online magazine and resource in the industry. Designer of the Bluetooth logo and recognized in Entrepreneur Magazine's "Top 40 Under 40" for founding American Wholesale Floral, Politz is also the Co-founder of the Proof Awards and the CPG Awards and a partner in numerous consumer brands across the food and beverage sector.
