Our Pick For The Best Fast Food Fries Is 10x Tastier Than Five Guys Or Chick-Fil-A

Finding the best fast food french fries is an eternal struggle. At their worst, they're mealy, stale, and not worth the calories, but when they're good, they're crisp, salty, fluffy in the middle, and worth eating all by themselves. We recently went on our own fried potato journey by ranking the fries from 10 fast food joints and found that our winner, against all the stiff competition, is still the one you probably think it is: McDonald's.

Our taste tester put it simply: "They truly have it all — a perfect golden crispy finish with just the right amount of soft potato goodness. The flavor is textbook with a fantastic balance of grease and salt." The runners-up were fries from Habit Burger and Five Guys; Habit Burger serves a solid generic version of fast food fries, while Five Guys has somehow managed to nail the arcane art of enjoyable soggy spuds. But there's something about McDonald's fries that still captures the pinnacle of fast food magic. We'd love it if we were the unique outliers with this opinion, but a recent survey of 2,500 people from payment processor High Risk Pay confirms that McDonald's is the best-ranked, coming in at a solid score of 7.3 out of 10 overall.

While people might argue over their love of McDonald's Chicken McNuggets, Big Macs, or Snack Wraps, there's one thing they're sure to order, and it's those fries. In fact, people love McDonald's fries so much that they are the number one selling item at the chain. But there's a secret science to them: Every detail about McDonald's fries is carefully thought out, from the way they're cut to perfection (using water pressure to drive them through blades) to the packed combination of ingredients that gives them their savory taste, which includes "natural beef flavor." That beef flavoring is a throwback to when McDonald's used to cook its fries in beef tallow decades ago. The potatoes themselves have been carefully chosen (they're Russet varieties), and they're also salted right when they get out of the fryer, which allows the grains to stick to each fry. Most importantly, they are also engineered to be consistent across every visit, meaning you know what to expect each time you order them.

So no crinkle-cut (Shake Shack), waffle fry (Chick-fil-A), nor seasoned specimen can overthrow McDonald's reign as best fry, at least not yet. No matter how many different fries we try from different fast food chains, McDonald's will easily be our favorite, time and time again. And if you want some expert fry advice, we did the hard-hitting journalism once and learned that the 10-minute mark is where your McDonald's french fries start going downhill, so once you get them, start munching.