Taco Bell's Mexican Pizza Used To Have A Completely Different Name

Among the many Taco Bell menu items, Mexican Pizza has become a fan favorite for devotees of the restaurant chain. Those devotees include celebrities like Doja Cat, who is credited (along with more than 200,000 petition signatures) with bringing back the beloved menu item in 2022 after a year-and-a-half hiatus. Even Dolly Parton can't get enough of Taco Bell: She adds a Mexican Pizza to her standard order and appeared with Doja in Taco Bell's "Mexican Pizza: The Musical" live event on TikTok. However, the Mexican Pizza wasn't always known by this name, starting out as Pizzazz Pizza instead.

Pizzazz Pizza might be one of the Taco Bell menu items from the 1980s you forgot about. The addition of the pizza in 1985 was part of a bigger plan to revamp the fast food chain after a survey revealed that customers didn't like how the restaurants looked. As a result, the chain's logo and staff uniforms were overhauled, and the Mexican pizza was added as a cross-cultural item. It's believed that it was called Pizzazz Pizza because the company felt from trials that the name Mexican Pizza implied that the dish would be spicy, which it's not.

Plus, the Los Angeles Times quoted then-Taco Bell president John Martin saying, "We want to be a McDonald's with pizazz." Perhaps the word "pizzazz" was being used company-wide to reference their goal for the revamp and stuck as an option for naming the pizza.

The snazzy name for the Taco Bell Pizzazz Pizza was short-lived. By 1988, it was renamed Mexican Pizza, and the fast food chain may have been pushed in that direction. Ohio-based Pizzazz Pizza and Restaurant filed a trademark infringement lawsuit shortly after the menu item launched, alleging that using the moniker in television ads was confusing for customers (via Justia). While a temporary restraining order was imposed on Taco Bell from advertising, marketing, and selling Pizzazz Pizza in the Cleveland metropolitan area, it only lasted about a month. The chain won the litigation but has never officially cited the suit as a factor in the decision to rebrand.

The new Mexican Pizza name wasn't the only change that Taco Bell made. Over the years, the ingredients have changed, too. The Pizzazz Pizza originally featured black olives and green onions alongside the ingredients in the current version — refried beans and seasoned beef between crispy tortilla shells topped with sauce, diced tomatoes, and a blend of cheeses. However, a restaurant representative told Thrillist that those ingredients were removed in the early '90s and around 2006, respectively.

The ingredients have remained largely the same since then, except for a few limited-time and tested varieties. For instance, Taco Bell tested two new Mexican Pizza varieties — cheesy jalapeño and triple crunch — in select markets in late 2022 and early 2023, and the Cheesy Jalapeno Mexican Pizza is still available. Plus, Taco Bell gave the Mexican Pizza a mega-sized upgrade for the 2023 Super Bowl, an iteration that was four times the normal size and called The Big A** Mexican Pizza.