Very quietly, Taco John's has decided to come to Minnesota. The fast food chain has moved its headquarters to St. Louis Park and will now be located in West End.
They had already opened a support center in suburban Minneapolis three years ago but now they're making a move for the entire company. At the time of the support center opening, Taco John's noted that the presence of other food companies like Dairy Queen and Buffalo Wild Wings in the Twin Cities made it an appealing place to be.
Taco John's had been headquartered in Cheyenne, Wyoming since inception in 1969. The company has not publicly responded to media requests about the move, or officially confirmed it. But their corporate website does list the St. Louis Park, Minnesota address as their international home now.
Why Minnesota? It turns out the Mexican fast food restaurant has an unusually high concentration of stores around the Twin Cities, with nearly half of the entire Taco John's family within a four-hour drive of Minneapolis.
The Wyoming Tribune Eagle also reports that traveling to and from Midwest stores from Cheyenne was "inefficient" and involved a lot of travel for their corporate employees.
On social media, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz welcomed the news with a statement any fan of Taco John's can relate to: "Bring on the potato olés."
Found mostly in smaller markets of the Midwest and West, more than 97% of the Taco John's locations are run by franchisees.
WCCO political analyst Blois Olson talked about the move, and says while it seems like a big deal to get a new company headquarters here, the fact that it's a franchise business limits the impact economically.
"Yeah, I don't know how many jobs they're moving here or how big, this is a franchise company, right? So this is not, they're not making things. That's not to take anything away from the fact, that they're moving here."
Also worth watching according to Olson? St. Louis Park's West End might be a new target for businesses, as opposed to the old model of looking at downtown Minneapolis or St. Paul.
"There's some people who have floated, because there's now office towers there, that that could be the third downtown," Olson adds. "Because there is such a concentration of traffic and an ability to build new towers there. So, I think watch, as downtown struggles, we've seen in other cities, Phoenix, Dallas, even Chicago, the headquarters start to move to the suburbs."
Minnesota and the Twin Cities have long been a significant hub for food production and agriculture, with several major food companies headquartered here. Key companies like General Mills, CHS, Land O'Lakes, and Hormel Foods call Minnesota home, and Cargill, the largest private company in the U.S., has its headquarters in Minnesota.