The Best Fast Food Menu Items Of 2025

Fast food restaurants have been all aflutter in 2025, trying to meet customer demands and needs with a nod to changing tastes, dietary needs, and economic challenges like inflation and the impact of tariffs, as well as just staying ahead of the quick-service competition. Restaurant chains made big changes in 2025, debuting new items, bringing old and much missed favorites back to menus, opening stores in new areas, closing underperforming ones elsewhere, and all the while coming up with new dishes at a rapid clip.

There have been a lot of new fast food items that hit the fast food menu boards and restaurant apps in 2025. In adhering to the principle of metaphorically throwing things at the wall and seeing what sticks, seemingly every major national and regional chain took big swings with new entrees, dishes, sides, and desserts this year. Some of them came and went with little notice. Other things, both permanent and limited-time offerings, made a big impact with fans and critics. Here are all of the best new fast food items of 2025.

Wendy's has long been content to offer fried, breaded, and boneless chicken in its two most prevalent fast food forms: nuggets and as fillets on sandwiches. In September 2025, Wendy's met the public demand for well-crafted, not necessarily kid-oriented chicken strips with the launch of the simply named Chicken Tenders, but which is colloquially and in marketing calling Wendy's Tendys. The opposite of Wendy's tried and true, wet, greasy, dark meat-based budget nuggets, Wendy's Tendys are made from real pieces of chicken breast, so they're white meat only and moist. The breading, coming off like a combination of panko, crackers with hints of onion and garlic, is applied in a thin enough layer to make for a tender that comes out of the fryer crispy, but not crunchy, chicken-forward and less coating-dependent.

Wendy's Tendys are also the rare fast food chicken strip that's complemented by its recommended sauces, rather than getting completely overwhelmed by them. Six new dipping sauces debuted along with the Chicken Tenders, and half pair excellently. The Honey Mustard is a zestier, Dijon-hitting reboot of Wendy's pre-existing condiment of the same name, the Honey BBQ is equal parts tangy, smoky, and sweet, and the Sweet Chili Sauce is as flavorful as it is spicy.

What is a slice of pizza but an open-faced sandwich? It's got bread, cheese, sauce, and some kind of meat and veggies usually, just like a sandwich, except that it's floppy, sloppy, and hard to hold and eat on the go. Jimmy John's is a sandwich chain, but it's got basically all of the things on hand already to make pizza-adjacent menu items, and in 2025 it officially brought out two Toasted Pizza Sandwiches.

Evoking the French bread pizza that was a childhood staple for many and still found in the supermarket freezer under the Stouffer's brand, Jimmy John's Toasted Pizza Sandwiches are essentially two of those smashed together. Both selections start with a long and wide French-style baguette that gets drenched in marinara sauce and an oregano-basil spice blend. Then the Toasted Three Cheese Pizza Sandwich gets its supplies: big portions of Parmesan, provolone, and mozzarella cheese. Meat eaters would probably more enjoy the Toasted Sicilian Pizza Sandwich. Along with sliced mozzarella, sandwich makers crowd the bread with salami, ham, and capocollo.

Once strictly the provenance of Southern and soul food restaurants, and Roscoe's in Los Angeles, the all-American savory meets sweet classic of chicken and waffles finally hit the fast food mainstream in 2025. Tentatively rolled out for a very short and forgettable time in 2020, Chicken and Waffles arrived at KFC nationwide in April. Having already gotten its chicken recipe down, KFC clearly spent a lot of time perfecting its waffle recipe, unveiling a thick, substantial, and sweet Liege-style waffle that can handle a lot of syrup and stand up to the salty taste of its co-star.

While KFC's Chicken and Waffles was once more available for a limited time only, the 2025 launch was extremely high profile, and the chain offered numerous permutations of the all-time great arrangement. Those really good waffles, a fast food anomaly no matter the day, could be purchased alongside tenders or bone-in chicken.

Back in 2024, Taco Bell discontinued its Chipotle Ranch Grilled Chicken Burrito and in the past it has offered a number of products made with cut and trimmed pieces of beefy steak (as opposed to seasoned ground beef), but in 2025, it mashed up those fan-favorite concepts with the Chipotle Ranch Grilled Steak Burrito. Almost inconceivably, in a time of high food costs and general inflation, the premium fast food menu item hit Taco Bell's menu at a cost of just $3.

A true bargain, the Chipotle Ranch Grilled Steak Burrito was a hulking mass of an all-in-one-meal, providing a lot of calories as well as many tastes and textures, all thoughtfully layered. The chipotle spice penetrates the entire burrito, vying for attention with avocado and a creamy and spicy ranch sauce. Little tortilla strips hold up to the condiments and add some islands of crunch in a sea of soft, as does the chewy and satisfying steak. The whole thing probably stays together as well as it does because Taco Bell heats the Chipotle Ranch Grilled Steak Burrito, sealing it up and sealing in all the flavors.

Long thought of as a widely-appealing, family-courting, everyman's pizza chain, Pizza Hut took a chance at courting the foodies, the brunch crowd, and the tapas lovers in 2025. In August, it introduced a line of specifically adult-oriented personal entrees called Crafted Flatzz. Something of a cross between an elegant and understated flatbread one might find at a classy lunch spot, and a wonderfully saucy, cheesy, greasy chain restaurant pizza, the Crafted Flattz are oval-shaped and come in one of five curated flavors that are far beyond Pizza Hut's familiar fare.

Marinara and mozzarella can still be found on the Three Cheese Flatzz, along with Parmesan and Romano cheeses, while the Pepperoni Duo matches sliced pepperoni with the crispy cup-style. The Ultimate is loaded with pepperoni, sausage, tomatoes, and, surprisingly, roasted peppers and caramelized onions. Two other Flatzz challenge customers' whole idea of a pizza: the Nashville Chicken combines sweet-and-spicy poultry with onions and a pickle ranch drizzle, while the Chicken Bacon Ranch employs all of its titular ingredients.

Burger King leaned into its longtime slogan, "Have it your way" in 2025, introducing all sorts of combo meal modifications and a two-for-$5 and three-for-$7 bundling program, as well as the "Whopper for You" concept. Every few months, Burger King's national menu will feature a new spin on its flagship Whopper that has been suggested by a customer. The first burger concocted under the collaborative effort, the BBQ Brisket Whopper, arrived in the summer, and it evoked the warm-weather barbecues that certainly inspired it.

Burger King's BBQ Brisket Whopper is a two-meat treat, old and new all at once. Most of the usual Whopper elements are represented — there's a quarter-pound fire-cooked hamburger patty, lettuce, tomato, mayo, American cheese, pickles, and an extra-large sesame seed bun. But it's transformed by some rarely seen at Burger King condiments: crispy onions, a sweet barbecue sauce, and a hefty helping of slowly cooked and smoked barbecue brisket.

The chicken sandwich wars have entered a new era, and Chick-fil-A can no longer rest on its laurels regarding its original chicken sandwich, a simple construction of breaded fillet, bun, and pickles. The chain got the jump on Popeyes and other competitors in the chicken realm in 2025 with a deluxe sandwich that replaces some aspects of its signature menu item while executing some new ideas, too.

After receiving overwhelmingly high marks in a test market campaign in the spring, Chick-fil-A made the Pretzel Cheddar Club Sandwich a part of its full and national menu in August. In this latest offering, the reliably juicy and crispy breaded chicken breast fillet sits on top of fresh green leaf lettuce and tomato sauce and sits beneath a slide of real cheddar cheese and a couple of strips of bacon. Gone is the regular hamburger bun in favor of a tall, buttery, chewy, doughy, but not dry, pretzel roll. A Creamy Dijon Mustard Sauce packet comes standard for dipping, but one might as well put it right on the sandwich because it's the right condiment for such a prepared dish, which is also available with a grilled or spicy breaded fillet.

Nothing else hits quite like French onion soup, and it's generally going to take a little bit of effort or a lot of money to satisfy that craving. Homemade requires cooking a lot of smelly onions for a long time, along with some stale bread and pricey Gruyère cheese. Or it can be found on the appetizer menu at most any respectable steakhouse, which aren't known for being budget friendly. In 2025, the slightly upscale but still accessible fast food chain Shake Shack completely reimagined French onion soup, presenting the dish's exact flavor profile as a cheeseburger.

The shining beacon of its fall 2025 seasonal menu, Shake Shack's French Onion Soup Burger really does have all of the tastes and textures of its predecessor, except for the hot, wet broth. It's all the good parts: melted Gruyère and a small mountain of caramelized onions, with the toasted bun subbing in for the large crouton. It's available with one, two, or three Angus beef patties, which more than cover the beef stock usually used to make French onion soup.

Wendy's scored the fast food rights to Netflix's extremely popular goth-teen "The Addams Family" offshoot "Wednesday" in 2025, and marketed the series with the "Meal of Misfortune" combo. Along with four unlabeled dipping sauces for chicken nuggets, the meal came standard with a brand new Frosty, sold under the dark and magical name of Raven's Blood.

While the Frosty is a malt-like, chocolate-flavored frozen treat somewhere between a shake and a sundae, the Raven's Blood modifications make the Wendy's staple even better. Customers can choose between a base of classic chocolate or the heretofore occasional vanilla flavor for their Raven's Blood. A blackbird's life juice isn't the key ingredient, though: that's the very sanguine appearing but a lusciously sweet proprietary cherry sauce. Wendy's has been rolling out new Frosty flavors with regularity as of late, and they've nearly all been limited-time only affairs. Raven's Blood will likely share the same cursed fate, so get the cherry-blasted dessert while it's still on the menu.

Provided that the McDonald's McFlurry machine isn't broken, the chain's frozen dessert consisting of soft serve almost-ice cream and mix-ins can be anything the customer wants it to be, provided the appropriate ingredients are on hand. McDonald's recommends ordering off the menu however, and trying one of its predetermined concoctions, such as ones made with Oreo cookies or M&M's. In 2025, McDonald's embraced the spirit of sweet treat creativity, bringing out a whole new fixed McFlurry flavor that made a dessert known for being hot and melty very cold.

Introducing the Hershey's S'mores McFlurry. It's everything that makes an ice cream sundae, or a McFlurry, terrific, as well as the core ingredients in the best item to ever emerge from the world of campfire cuisine, S'mores. Embedded in fluffy vanilla soft serve are finely chopped graham cracker crumbs, a bevy of miniature marshmallows, and tiny pieces of real Hershey's chocolate.

With an extensive 2025 media campaign,  Taco Bell announced that it was now a chicken place and not just a taco place. It appeared as if the fast food juggernaut was stepping into the fried and boneless chicken trend that had preoccupied the sandwich-oriented places for the better part of the last half decade. But while Taco Bell's Crispy Chicken Nuggets looked like yet another entry into dredged, coated, and fried balls of poultry, available in most family-friendly restaurant and supermarket freezer, the popularizer of Mexican-inspired food was actually trying something new, novel, and intriguing.

Taco Bell's Crispy Chicken Nuggets aren't really nuggets in the traditional fast food sense, as they're not uniform, pressed and shaped bits of chicken, but pieces of actual white meat, individually coated and cooked in the popcorn chicken style. The chain also elevated the concept in the way those Crispy Chicken Nuggets get ready for frying. They receive a marination in a bath of jalapeño-infused buttermilk, which imparts a light spice and big taste before getting blanketed in finely crushed tortilla chips. There isn't much to making a chicken nugget, but Taco Bell brought new thinking to each stage of the process. They even stand up to the associated, inventive dipping sauces, which include Jalapeño Honey Mustard and Hidden Valley Fire Ranch Sauce.

The various chicken products at Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen are already a little bit spicy — if one explicitly orders their pieces, strips, or sandwich "spicy." But the Popeyes Hot Ones Menu brings extreme spice to some favorites. It's a collaboration with probably the most famous entity associated with the currently culturally cresting hot sauce culture: Sean Evans' talk show "Hot Ones," in which celebrities are asked probing questions while they fight back symptoms indicating extreme discomfort imparted by the consumption of chicken wings coated in progressively hotter sauces.

In between the extreme sides of the scale, with the sort-of spicy Sizzlin' Sriracha Dippers strips on one end and the positively painful Darin' Dab Ghost Wings on the other, stands the Hot Ones Smokin' Rojo Sandwich. It's a variant of the headline-making, restaurant-packing Popeyes chicken sandwich, consisting of a crunchy breaded chicken fillet on a soft brioche bun, along with sliced pickles and the specially made Hot Ones Los Calientes Rojo sauce. It's hot, but not too hot, and also bursting with complex and layered pepper flavor.

McDonald's rarely changes its breakfast menu, steadfastly sticking with little more than the same lineup of McMuffin breakfast sandwiches for decades. In July 2025, however, it unveiled a whole new mini-line of breakfast sandwiches, getting in on the fiery food trend that's gripped fast food the last few years.

The Spicy McMuffin is a take on the regular Egg McMuffin with a little kick. It's got an English muffin, Canadian bacon, an egg patty, American cheese, and a squirt of McDonald's new Spicy Pepper Sauce. As making a McMuffin a Spicy McMuffin really only requires the sauce, the new version of the old sandwich is also available as the Spicy Sausage McMuffin and the Spicy Sausage McMuffin with Egg. While potentially just a limited-time promotion, McDonald's could keep the option around for longer, with that Spicy Pepper Sauce adding flavor, and not just heat, to an overly familiar and fairly bland series of sandwiches.

Hungry Howie's ranks near the top of our ranking of the best chain pizza restaurants, and that's primarily for its multiple novel flavored crusts. The company is headquartered in the Detroit area and only in 2025 did it unveil its own version of the increasingly visible local take on pizza. Hungry Howie's Detroit-Style Pizza is the only nationally available take that's historically accurate, and it's also very tasty.

The pie is deep, with a dough that's fluffy as well as thick that can support a hefty load of toppings like cheese that goes from edge to edge and gets very crispy and powerful and melts under the generous portion of savory tomato sauce, which in true Detroit-style, goes on top in two quick strips. The rectangular, square-sliced pizza debuted in September 2025, and has been earning raves for its flavorful crust, authenticity and cheesy goodness.