Border Foods celebrates 40-year Taco Bell career started as late-night closer

Theresa Williams did not start at Taco Bell expecting a career. She started as a late-night closer on Rice Street in St. Paul, Minnesota, and 40 years later she is still with the brand, now working as an Employee Relations Specialist.

That arc matters because it shows what long-term retention can look like in quick service when training and promotion are treated as systems, not slogans. Border Foods, the New Hope-based Taco Bell franchisee behind Williams’ story, said her path ran through Shift Manager, Assistant General Manager, General Manager, Training Store Manager, Area Training Manager and District Manager before she moved into home-office work. For crew members and shift leads who hear a lot about “growth opportunity” but see little of it, that list is the point.

Border Foods used Williams’ anniversary to put a concrete face on the internal pipeline Taco Bell and its franchisees like to advertise. Taco Bell’s careers site says employees can move from Team Member to Restaurant Manager and that the company will support growth along the way. Border Foods’ version of that promise was Williams herself, a worker who came in for what she thought would be a part-time job and stayed through a chain of promotions that carried her from store-level closing shifts to company support work.

The company’s scale makes the lesson harder to dismiss as one feel-good exception. Border Foods says it employs more than 7,000 people across multiple states and operates 250-plus restaurants across the Upper Midwest. A 2024 TCB Magazine report said the franchisee was founded by Jeff and Lee Engler in 1996, had just under 250 Taco Bell locations and was opening its 250th store in Davenport, Iowa. In an operation that large, the difference between a revolving door and a real ladder affects thousands of schedules, paychecks and staffing plans.

Border Foods also tied Williams’ career to another longtime operator inside the company, Carol Williams, who helped develop and promote her early on. Carol Williams died in 2018 after a long battle with cancer, after 30 years at Border Foods. A tribute remembered her as a mentor, leader and friend, and the company later created scholarships in her honor. That detail says as much about the franchisee’s retention culture as the promotion ladder does: advancement depended on managers who actually coached people and kept moving them forward.

For Taco Bell workers, the bigger takeaway is that durable careers in fast food are still possible, but they do not happen by accident. They depend on a local operator willing to train, promote and keep employees attached to the business long enough for an entry-level job to become a 40-year run.