Taco Bell is moving its Live Más Café concept from a small-format test toward a broader beverage platform. The chain said October 15 that the café now has 39 locations and will enter the greater Indianapolis market, add Southern California sites and open a standalone Las Vegas Strip flagship later this year.
The most concrete next opening is scheduled for Thursday, October 22, at 252 East State Street in West Lafayette, Indiana. Taco Bell says additional Live Más Cafés in Greenfield and Muncie are planned before the end of 2026. Two of the three Indianapolis-area locations will be company-owned; the third will be operated by KMAC Enterprises. The release does not identify which operator controls each named site.
The Las Vegas plan takes a different form. Longtime franchisee Diversified Restaurant Group will operate a standalone café in a shipping container next to the Taco Bell Cantina at 3717 South Las Vegas Boulevard, Suite 140-A. Taco Bell says the flagship will carry more than 20 specialty beverages, Vegas-exclusive alcoholic drinks and location-only merchandise. It gives only a “later this fall” window, not an exact opening date.
Southern California will also get cafés at Century City Mall, Irvine and Tustin before year-end. Exact addresses and dates were not announced, so they are not inferred here.
The expansion arrives with a four-drink horchata lineup available at participating Live Más Café locations for a limited time, while supplies last. Published starting prices are $4.19 for a small Purple Horchata Chiller, $4.79 for a small Chocolate Horchata Cold Brew Float, and $4.19 for medium Strawberry and Vanilla-Spiced Horchata Refrescas. Participation, hours and prices vary; tax is extra and delivery prices are higher.
The strategic signal is what happens next. On December 10, Taco Bell plans to move the Strawberry Horchata Refresca, Vanilla-Spiced Horchata Refresca and a new Vanilla-Spiced Horchata Freeze onto participating Taco Bell menus nationwide for a limited time. The café is therefore doing two jobs: creating a distinct visit occasion and screening beverages for the much larger core system.
Taco Bell says Live Más Café has sold approximately 1.3 million beverages to date, with breakfast and afternoon emerging as the strongest dayparts. It also says café locations delivered favorable transaction growth over the past year. Those are company-reported directional results; the release does not publish comparable-store sales, ticket, margin or café-level profitability.
The chain’s stated objective is $5 billion in beverage sales by 2030. A test-and-transfer model could help it get there more efficiently. Café stores can run a deeper specialty menu, observe daypart behavior and identify drinks with national potential before asking thousands of conventional Taco Bell restaurants to execute them.
For operators, the important detail is ownership mix. Company cafés can be used for rapid experimentation, while franchise partners such as KMAC and Diversified Restaurant Group test whether the format travels outside a controlled corporate estate. That creates a more credible scaling read than a single flagship alone.
The questions still open are the ones that matter most for economics: café build and equipment costs, labor requirements, average ticket, cannibalization versus incremental visits, and how many of the 39 current locations use each operating model. Taco Bell disclosed none of those figures.
The West Lafayette opening and December national menu transfer provide the next two checkpoints. If the café can produce both local transaction growth and repeatable core-menu winners, Taco Bell will have built more than a beverage sub-brand. It will have built a development and innovation system.
