Food Theory: Never Order McDonald's Medium Fries!

It's Friday Friday I have to buy my

fries

on Friday I'm not sure the larger size is worth it Friday Friday calculating the value Friday I'm still not sure the larger size is worth it super size super size yes super size super size yes the songs I hope they are not going to be marked for copyright do people already know that reference? is this this is what is this this is old this is old hello foreigner Internet welcome to Food Theory the show where you come for the crunchy golden nuggets of knowledge and stay for the extra bits at the bottom of the bag as many Of you who have watched my shows for a while know that best

food

was a big part of my early life, it was my home cooking in the '90s, an era when Happy Meals weren't overwhelmed by options. like juices, apples, bean sprouts or anything healthy available today.

What is this? Oh, they're not even giving kids cavities or an unhealthy BMI, how can you even call it Happy Meal? The healthy choice was drinking an orange Hi C instead of soda and then getting into fights in kindergarten over those Happy Meal toys that were shaped like hamburgers and ice cream cones but later turned into dinosaurs. Wait, you can get a full set of those for 15 online right now. What a steal, I mean, I definitely didn't just put in my two cents, so there's no need to look for that, don't leave it alone, that's not something that really exists.

Once I grew up, I became smarter and also poorer and I realized that. The kids'

food

is kind of outrageous with how much food you get, so I switched to getting a regular burger and

fries

, but it turns out that was just the advice of my friends at Frugal Frosty. I learned how to maximize that one dollar menu through my poor years as a college student my poor years as an actor my poor years as an unemployed YouTuber, anyway you get the idea, there's a whole world of fast food economizing right at my covered fingers of fat, but in all the years and all of fast food since then I have

never

done an exhaustive test to see which was the most efficient

order

, so today we start with the most universally loved fast food item on the planet, the that Sparks Furious debates no matter where you're from. here in the US what is the best

order

of fries and today I'm not measuring the best fries based on things that matter, you know, like taste or some kind of nutritional value.

Let's face it, taste is subjective or one

theory

for another. day, nutritional value is a moot point, we are talking about fries, not here, today it is about dollars and cents, if I want my fries to decide what is the best type of fry and what is the best size to buy them. I think the conventional wisdom is that larger sizes will always provide better value, but has anyone ever tested whether we're sure we can trust McDonald's oversized fry to actually provide us oversized value? What if it was something? random, like

medium

is the best fries to buy and then what about different types of fries, like Arby's curly fries?

Would there be a different strategy to increase them? All I want to know is what the perfect order of fast food fries is. to get me the most fries for my money and the good news is that I'm no longer in the backseat of the drive-thru, so the only thing stopping me from getting a dozen orders of fries and conducting a pseudoscientific study. Optimizing French fries is my concern for my own well-being, but this, my friends, is in the name of science and on behalf of all consumers, so I am willing to consume as many French fries as it takes to get there. . golden, crunchy truth, get out your Sam's Club-sized bottles of ketchup or mayonnaise if you're one of the weirdos, or both if you're from Idaho, and get ready to dive into the science and economics of the fries we're about to make. to get some fries let's do some science experiments and drive through we're going to get so many fries it's crazy that's how the studio works Steph and I wanted to try all the major forms of fries on the cheap, natural cut fries , thicker, curly and waffle fries Because fries prices vary between regions, we conducted the test in three different markets: Los Angeles, New York and Raleigh, North Carolina.

This also narrowed the list of fast food restaurants available to us because any French fry we chose to try had to be available at all three. locations, this means we won't cover an exhaustive list of every fast food restaurant out there. This is also to keep everyone from getting their underwear in a bunch because I didn't cover your regional favorite like In and Out or Whataburger, you guys. You can take those arguments to the comments section. The focus here is to discover a nationally available representative sample of each type of potato chips, that way you can also apply the principles of potato chip efficiency to your regional favorites, so based on these four main categories, I headed to McDonald's. its Wendy's for its thicker cut natural fries, Arby's for curly fries, and Chick-fil-A for waffle fries.

Sorry, Carl's Jr really needs to get some locations here in NC, and I know Hardee's is technically supposed to be the same thing, but it's a different franchise name and so I couldn't accept it, you're introducing a weird variable in our hardcore scientific method and for a mildly educational YouTube video on the subject, food that won't stand up to natural cross cuts, curls and twists, whatever McDonald's makes. By getting them all, can I get an order from each of the small,

medium

and large establishments? Could they all be packed separately? We received an order for small, medium, and large fries from each of the establishments mentioned, except Chick-fil-A, which does not offer a small size at every location we visited, so we only considered their medium and large waffle fries for the experiment.

Also, Arby's didn't have their snack size at all three locations, so that was also left out of the experiment, but as for the 11 orders of fries. which were available in all locations. We got each one in a separate bag to reduce any ambiguity about which order the bagler fries came from, then we used a digital scale to weigh each order of fries without the wrapper, so we placed the bowl on top and then broke it down so that everything What we add is just the weight of the fries. This will allow us to know in raw terms how many fries we get in each order of each size.

We can compare it to the price of each order of fries to determine what it is. In fact, it was the most efficient order of fries, but we also wanted to get an idea of ​​how efficiently each order of fries filled its container, because fried containers can be these little soft bags or these big cardboard tubes that They'll tell us how well or poorly each shape of fry has actually been designed for its container and which restaurant really wants to look like they're serving giant fries when in reality they're just serving a giant bunch of air, so we seal up any cracks. or opening in the fries.

The containers were then filled with sifted all-purpose flour to get an idea of ​​the total capacity of each container. This in turn will help us better understand what I call fry fill percentage or ffp. I use my numbers to calculate a whole battery of different things. Not only the ffp that tells me how full each fry container is, but also the number of grams of fry I get per percentage of the money I spend and the number of calories per percent I spend based on the nutritional information. given on each chain's website to make sure I'm getting the most calories out of a box to get our price and mass values, we average the results from the three test cities, put them all in one big table and you get something that looks like this.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the potato chip efficiency data table. With all of these calculations we can determine which order of fries is optimal in terms of its monetary value versus its competition, which order fills its own container most effectively, and which offers the greatest quantity. percentage of caloric punch you're expending, let's see how they did, shall we start with what matters most to us all? money at a glance McDonald's fries I hate to say it that way McDonald's fries stand out as the least expensive on the market However, our goal here is to find out if the best deal on paper is actually the best deal or if many Of those packages of fry are literally full of hot air, in our results we found that none of the small sizes of fry were the most profitable for their respective restaurant, keeping in mind the idea that if you pay a little more, you will get a little More frying for your money, at least to some extent, the best cost per gram in the small sizes actually came from McDonald's, which weighed 1.76 cents per gram, meaning that if you absolutely must get a small serving, your The best option is a very small portion, specifically from McDonald's, as you would expect and as advertised, it actually tends to save you money all around. types of fries with the biggest difference at Arby's, we go from a small to a medium, it saves you 45, in fact, it turns out that the curly fries category is a total wild card, not only did Arby's medium curly fries end up being cheaper per gram than the large, there were actually more fries in my medium order than I got in my large order, you heard right, we actually paid on average 23 cents more for the large and got fewer fry total in the order , the medium one had a miraculous fishing cost. of 1.35 cents per gram, coming in third behind McDonald's Large Fry at 126 per gram and Wendy's Large Natural Cut at 1.32 cents per gram, so you can generally expect to receive more Fry dough per your dollar by ordering a large cut, except at Arby's, where large actually gets you a negligible amount, if not less, than medium.

There are now many fast food conspiracy theories online, one of which is that workers are told not to fill the larger fry containers to save pennies on the dollar and I was wondering if my Arby's results were a potential example of this. Actually, I don't think that's what's really happening. I do think there is an inherent problem with curly fries, but it's not a problem with the people, it's a problem with the packaging, let's talk about the fry efficiency metric number. two, the fill percentage of ffp fry, well, the value per unit of fry tended to increase as order sizes grew;

The opposite is actually true with fill percentages, larger packages tended to result in more empty space, but the shape of the chips and the shape of their containers seem to largely determine how full the packaging could be. . Viewers of my other channels may remember that I did an episode of the movie Theory a couple of years ago where I calculated how much money Scrooge McDuck would have, in part by determining how much empty space. he would be left packing gold coins stacked in his vault. In researching that episode I discovered that when you stack rigid gold coins, the maximum packing you could get was only about 57 percent and we'll find those chips.

The packaging is actually significantly worse than that, the least efficient fries were Chick-fil-A's waffle fries, which makes sense for many reasons, one of them being that the fries are larger, so that there is less room for them to be packed densely together, but another is that the holes in the waffle shape ensure that there will be empty space inside the fries, as well as between the fries, Arby's fries packaging is also complicated, the curliest of those fries that I will refer to here as Springs. They are essentially cylinders and Arby's fry containers are also more or less cylindrical, if we ignore the height of those little curly, jagged fries, the boomerangs, I call them, they are basically little lies that remind us how good Springs are, so we're talking about how to pack circles into other circles, an exercise that will always leave us with a ton of empty space.

It also explains why the weight of the fries in the medium Arby's and the large Arby's were almost exactly the same, the large is only half an inch wider than the medium, which is actually not wide enough to fit another spring in the potato boxfries, which means that the effective capacity of the medium and large is practically the same, the only thing that can be added to the larger box are some little anemic boomerangs that Let's face it, it means that we could also be eating a normal fries with a hunchback who tastes like burnt. I hate that stuff now, it's this corporate greed, are they using geometry for their benefit because it could be intentionally designed this way after every fast food company costs a dime? margin businesses, meaning they look for ways to save fractions of a cent on menu items to keep their prices low, so maybe the argument can certainly be made, but the facts, well, we'll

never

know, what It is said on the other side of the coin is McDonald's and Wendy's.

They are relatively efficient at packaging their fries and Wendy's is particularly good as their cube-shaped fries fit well into Wendy's rectangular containers, a little better than McDonald's containers, which are more elliptical; In fact, we found that Wendy's Natural Cut Fries have the best fill rate on average. at almost 53 percent, the best individual in terms of filling rate, however, he gets a big surprise: McDonald's is small, not because of the shape of the McDonald's fry or the shape of the container, but because of the container material, the small McDonald's is the only one of these 11 servings of fries that is served in a paper bag rather than a rigid cardboard container, so the bag can act more like a fluid and can take any shape as you need to accommodate as many fries as possible.

The fill rate for this serving was about 57.5, so if you're one of those people who gets really put off by all the empty space you find when you open a bag of Doritos, the McDonald's fry is the order for you. . The last metric we want to consider for fry efficiency is caloric load versus cost. Which gives me the most calories for my money. Well, most of us are trying to minimize our calories in case of an apocalypse where you want to save on fries and make sure you choose the most calorie-dense version at the best price.

I've got it covered right now. This is Arby's in a landslide, as they take three of the top five spots in calorie percentage, so look for those little ones and curlies if you're prepping for doomsday and want some old fries to be a part of it for some reason. reason and with that we tabulate our results taking into account the total value and cost per gram of container filling and the percentage of calories expended are champions of optimized potato chips. Oh man, not another drum roll joke. I'll just say it: Wendy's Large Fries with an impressive 26 points out of what would have been a perfect score of 30.

Second place was Arby's Medium with 22 points and in last place was Chick-fil-A's Medium Waffle Fries with only eight points total and never, ever order a large Arby's, if you order at Arby's always order a medium, so there you have it folks, Wendy's large fries and Arby's medium, the two most efficient fries . purchases from all of them, the last real question I have left today is whether dipping your Wendy's large fries in ice cream means you're a genius or disgusting, and the other question I have is whether that subscribe button remains unclicked, consider remedying it. Now, in case you didn't know, this is just one of the five videos we've released today as part of our channel launch, so keep going, keep watching, it's only 20 steps away, you can totally complete it, friends mine I believe in you, if you manage to see all five today, you will get the theoretical seal of approval.

Seriously, we'd love to have you as a subscriber as we delve into this delicious new world of food science and edutainment if you made it this far. The video you must have liked what you saw so nothing is stopping you from hitting the subscribe button right now so do it please hit subscribe. It would be nice if this channel did well. I really enjoy doing food theories, please help. This channel will be a success but hey, that's just a topic. Creepy, a

theory

of food, bon appetit.