Let’s taco-bout the top products sold for National Taco Day

In celebration of National Taco Day in the U.S., we bring you our latest installment of Veryfi Insights, a new industry resource focused on uncovering some of the most unexpected and, well, insightful revelations hidden in the vast amount of zero-party data submitted to the Veryfi OCR API Platform. If you missed our inaugural posts on gas prices in the U.S. and the #1 product purchased with coffee, check it out!

How we found the top products sold for “Taco Night”

We queried our receipt data for 10 leading supermarkets in the U.S., finding all receipts that included a purchase of at least one line item including “taco”. Then, we analyzed the line items within those receipts to identify which products were most frequently purchased alongside those taco ingredients and brands.

Which product is most commonly purchased with Tacos?

Cheese reigns supreme as the #1 product purchased alongside tacos! We’re not surprised, as we would like to believe it’s not a real fiesta until there’s queso. Here are the top 5 products, showcasing the big winner on “Taco Tuesday” is the dairy industry, apparently… 

1. Cheese
2. Ice Cream
3. Yogurt
4. Bananas
5. Butter

As it turns out, the top products sold alongside tacos are dairy products. We also saw the “Three B’s” make the top 10: bananas, butter, and beans, oh my!

What other insights did we find?

Here are some additional conclusions we drew from the analysis:

• To round out the top 10 items: tortillas, milk, chicken, beans, and Tostitos made the list.
• Dairy products lock down the top 3 and 5 of the top 10 ingredients with tacos.
• Tostitos is the only brand in the top 10 and completely dominated Doritos in the data set.
• As for “Taco Night” beverages, Corona ranked below the other popular beer brands, so we guess tacos aren’t enough to sway consumer beer tastes. We’ll go cry our limes out now!

Ultimately, what was most exciting to us about these insights was that we could see differences between the brands sold alongside those taco products. Tostitos completely dominating Doritos was very surprising, and could be concerning for those tortilla chip companies. One possible explanation is that consumer tastes lean towards Tostitos as they offer “Scoops”, a uniquely shaped tortilla chip that makes scooping up your favorite salsa or queso a breeze, and they have plain tortilla chips, versus the already-flavored Doritos “Cool Ranch” and “Nacho Cheese”.

Let’s taco-bout the protein winner…the trophy goes to chicken and fish, as they each slightly edged out beef!

This result came as a surprise, because we thought beef was what’s for dinner! The rise of chicken and fish over beef could be due to Americans being more cost-conscious with rising inflation and soaring premium beef prices. Additionally, changing consumer preferences to eliminate or reduce consumption of red meat may be showing up in the decline of beef sales. All of this makes us wonder: what’s the beef with red meat?

People still go bananas for, well, bananas!

Bananas are still America’s favorite fresh fruit, and they’ve consistently cracked the top 5 most purchased items in our Veryfi Insights series. Why is that? Perhaps bananas are a true American household staple, and can be easily eaten on the go, like a perfect baby burrito.

Deeper insights into brand affinities

This playful look into taco brands convinced us that we’re tapping into a goldmine of insights on consumer shopping behavior and brand affinities. In our next installment of Veryfi Insights, we’re planning to dive deeper into the products sold alongside two iconic beverage brands. Are you team red or team blue? We can’t wait to share the results!