Let me begin by stating that I know the difference between a legitimate scientific experiment and what I was attempting at lunchtime today.
However, I did have a hypothesis and controlled and variable factors. I brought three brands of "street" tacos to the table and six varieties in all. What separated our Taco Truck Challenge, which was held at Dichotomy at Croft Art Gallery, from a more sophisticate survey is I didn't control it as well as I could have nor did I have a massive sampling size.
So it was part survey and part "let's just grab some tacos and give them to people for free."
My hypothesis was that people would prefer the La Lola Loca taco, which is more of a chain type of thing as Aramark has brought it to the Baylor campus, over the more local taco truck tacos.
Here's how the challenge worked: We bought tacos from Zacatecas, La Lola Loca and El Pollo Palenque and put them into unlabeled gift bags — one brown, one red and one silver. Then each challenge participant ate a taco from each bag and ranked them. When all the tacos were gone, I tallied the points, awarding three points to a first-place ranking, two points to a second place ranking and one point to a third place ranking.
Guess what happened? They all accumulated the same number of points.
So in a way, the whole thing was a wash, except for the fact that we gathered together and enjoyed tacos at Dichotomy, which was really the greater affect of the WacoFork Taco Truck Pepsi Challenge anyway (Pepsi was not affiliated with this event in any way).
But if you look at it another way, my hypothesis was correct. The silver bag, containing the La Lola Loca tacos, received the most first-place votes. It's just that everyone who didn't pick it first, placed it last.
Taken from another perspective, it could be said that La Lola Loca finished last because the limited amount of testimony I gathered suggested the La Lola Loca taco was "kind of generic" compared to the others.
That's the data i've gathered. If anyone would like to move this research forward, like for a doctoral thesis on the popularity of street tacos in Waco, I can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..
