Food Theory: Never Order McDonald's Medium Fries!

it's friday friday gotta get my fries on friday not sure the bigger size is worth it worth it friday friday calculating value on friday still not sure the bigger size is worth it worth it supersize super size yeah supersize super size yeah this song's hopefully not gonna get flagged for copyright do people even know that reference anymore this this thing this is this an old one there's an old one hello internet welcome to food theory the show where you come for the crispy golden nuggets of knowledge and stay for the extra bits at the bottom of the bag as many of you who've watched my shows for some time know fast food was a huge part of my early life it was my home cooking in the 90s an era when happy meals weren't being weighed down by options like juice or apples or bean sprouts or whatever healthy stuff is in there these days what is this stuff ugh they're not even giving kids cavities or an unhealthy bmi how can you even call it a happy meal no my healthy choice was drinking an orange high c instead of soda and then getting in kindergarten brawls over those happy meal toys that were shaped like hamburgers and ice cream cones but then turned into dinosaurs wait you can get a full set of those for 15 online right now what a steal i mean definitely didn't just put in my bid so there's no need to go searching for that no leave that alone that isn't the thing that really exists as i got older i got smarter and also poorer and i realize that the kids meal is kind of a racket for the amount of food that you get so i switched to buying a regular hamburger and fries but turns out that that was just the tip of my frugal frosty friends i learned to maximize that dollar menu through my poor years as a college student my poor years as an actor my poor years as an unemployed youtuber you get the idea anyway there is a whole world of fast food economizing out there at my grease covered fingertips but in all the years and all the fast food since then i've never done a comprehensive test to see what was the most efficient order out there so today we're starting with the most universally loved fast food item on the planet the one that sparks furious debates no matter where you're from especially here in the u.s what is the best french fry order and today i'm not measuring the best french fry based on things that matter you know like taste or some kind of nutritional value let's face it taste is subjective or is it a theory for another day and nutritional value is kind of a moot point we're talking about the french fry here no today it's all about dollars and cents if i want my fry fix what is the best type of fry to buy and what is the best size to buy it in i think the conventional wisdom is that larger sizes are always going to provide you a better value but has anyone ever really tested that are we sure that we can trust that mcdonald's super size fry is really delivering us a super-sized value what if it's something random like the medium is the best fry to buy and then what about different fry types like what about arby's curly fries would there be a different strategy to upsizing those all i want to know is what the perfect fast food french fry order is what is going to get me the most fry for my buck and the good news is that i'm no longer in the back seat of the drive-through so the only thing stopping me from getting a dozen orders of french fries and conducting a pseudo-scientific study of fry optimization is my concern for my own well-being but this my friends is in the name of science and on behalf of all the consumers out there so i'm willing to go through as many fries as i have to to get to that crispy golden truth get out your sam's club-sized bottles of ketchup or mayonnaise if you're one of the weirdos or both if you happen to be from idaho and get ready to dip into the science and economics of the french fry we're going to get some french fries let's do some scientific experiments and fast food drive-throughs we're going to get so much fried potato it's crazy here's how the study works steph and i wanted to test all the major fry shapes shoestring thicker natural cut fries curly fries and waffle cut since fry prices vary between regions we conducted the test in three different markets los angeles new york and raleigh north carolina this also narrowed down the list of fast food restaurants available to us because any fry we chose to test had to be available in all three locations this means that we won't be covering an exhaustive list of every fast food restaurant out there this is also to prevent everyone from getting their undies in a bunch because i didn't cover their regional favorite like in and out or whataburger you guys can take those arguments to the comments section the focus here is uncovering a representative nationally available sample of each fry type that way you can apply the principles of french fry efficiency to your regional favorites as well so based on these four major categories i targeted mcdonald's for their shoestring fries wendy's for their thicker cut natural fry arby's for curly fries and chick-fil-a for waffle fries sorry carl's jr you really need to get some locations here in north carolina which i know that hardee's is technically supposed to be the same thing but it's a different franchise name and thus i couldn't go with it it's introducing an extraneous variable into our hardcore scientific method and for a youtube video mildly educational about the topic of food that will not stand twisty curly cross-cut natural whatever mcdonald's makes we're getting them all can i get a one order of each small medium and large but could they all be bagged separately we got an order of small medium and large fries from each of the establishments mentioned except for chick-fil-a which didn't offer a small at every location we visited so we only considered their medium and large waffle fry for the experiment also orbeez didn't have their snack size at all three locations so that too was left out of the experiment but as for the 11 fry orders that were available in all locations we got each in a separate bag to reduce any ambiguity of which bagler fries came from which order then we used a digital scale to weigh each order of fries without the packaging so we put the bowl on top and then we tear it so that way anything we add is just fry weight this will let us know in raw terms how much fry we're getting in each order of each size we can compare that to the price of each order of fries to figure out which is in fact the most efficient fry order but we also wanted to get a sense of how effectively each order of fries filled its container because fry containers can either be these soft little baggies or these big honkin cardboard tubes that'll tell us how well or badly each fry shape has actually been engineered for its container and which restaurant really wants to make it look like they're serving up jumbo fries when actually they're just serving up a bunch of jumbo air so we sealed any cracks or openings in the fry containers then filled them with sifted all-purpose flour to get a sense of the total capacity of each container this in turn will help us better understand what i call the fry fill percentage or ffp i use my numbers to calculate a whole battery of different things not just the ffp which tells me how fry filled each container is but also the number of grams of fry i'm getting percent of money that i'm spending and the number of calories per cent i'm spending based on the nutritional facts given on each change website to make sure that i'm getting the most calories for my box to get our price and mass values we average the results from all 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 fry efficiency data table much data using all of these calculations we can determine which order of fries is optimal in terms of its monetary value against its competition which order fills its own container most effectively and which delivers the greatest caloric punch per cent that you're spending let's see how they did shall we starting with what we all care about most the money at a glance the mcdonald's small fries i hate saying it that way the mcdonald's small fry jumps out as the least expensive on the entire board our goal here though is to find out if the best deal on paper is actually the best deal or if a lot of those fry packs are full of hot air literally in our results we found that none of the small sizes of fry was the most cost effective for its respective restaurant playing into the idea that if you pay a little bit more well you're gonna get a little bit more fry for your buck at least to a point the best cost per gram on the small sizes did indeed come from mcdonald's who weighed in at 1.76 cents per gram meaning that if you absolutely have to get yourself a small fry your best bet is a shoestring fry specifically from mcdonald's upsizing as you might expect and as they advertise does indeed tend to save you money across all fry types with the biggest difference happening at arby's we're going from a small to a medium saves you 45 in fact it turns out that the curly fry category is a total wild card not only did the arby's medium curly fry wind 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 that right we actually paid on average 23 cents more for the large and got less total fry in the order the medium had a miraculously efficient cost of 1.35 cents per gram coming in third behind mcdonald's large shoestring fry at 126 per gram and the windy's large natural cut at 1.32 cents per gram so generally you can expect to receive more fry mass for your dollar by ordering a large except at arby's where the large is actually giving you a negligible amount if not less than the medium now there are a lot of fast food conspiracy theories online one of which is about workers being told to under fill the largest fry containers to save pennies on the dollar and i was wondering if my arby's results was a potential example of this i don't actually think that's what's really going on i do think there's 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 fry efficiency metric number two the ffp fry fill percentage well the value per unit of fry tended to increase as the sizes of the orders got larger the opposite is actually true for the fill percentages larger packages tended to result in more empty space but the shape of the fries and the shape of their containers greatly seemed to determine how full the packaging could actually get viewers of my other channels might remember i did an episode of film theory a couple years ago where i calculated how much money scrooge mcduck would have partially by determining how much empty space would be left by the packing of gold coins stacked in his vault i found in that episode's research that when you're stacking rigid gold coins the maximum packing that you could get was only at about 57 percent and we're gonna find that french fry packing is actually significantly worse than that the least efficient fries were the waffle fries from chick-fil-a which makes sense for a lot of reasons one of these is that the fries are just larger so there's less room for them to pack densely together but another is that the holes in the waffle shape guarantee that there's gonna be empty space within the fries in addition to between the fries the packing of the arby's fries is also tricky the curliest of those curly fries which i'll refer to here as springs are essentially cylinders and arby's fry containers are roughly cylindrical too if we ignore height and those little irregular curly fries the boomerangs i call them the ones that are basically just little lies that remind us how good the springs are then we're talking about how we pack circles into other circles an exercise that'll always leave us with a ton of empty space it also explains why the weight of fries in the arby's medium and the arby's large were almost exactly the same the large is only about half an inch wider than the medium which actually isn't wide enough to fit another spring into the box of fries meaning the effective capacity of the medium and the large is practically the same the only thing that can be added to the larger box are a few anemic little boomerangs which let's face it means we might as well be eating a regular fry with a hunchback that tastes burnt i hate those things now is this corporate greed are they using geometry to their advantage cause it could be intentionally designed this way after all fast food companies are penny margin businesses meaning that they look for ways to save fractions of a penny on menu items to keep their prices low so maybe the argument can certainly be made but the facts well we'll never know that said on the other side of the coin mcdonald's and wendy's are relatively efficient at packing their fries with wendy's being particularly good since its cuboid-shaped fries fit well in the windy's rectangular containers slightly better than the mcdonald's containers which are more elliptical indeed we find wendy's natural cut fries to have the best fill rate on average at nearly 53 the best individual fulfill rate however comes in at a big surprise the mcdonald's small not because of the shape of the mcdonald's shoestring fry or because of the shape of the container but because of the material of the container the mcdonald's small is the only one of these 11 fry servings to be served in a paper bag rather than a rigid cardboard container so the bag can actually act more like a fluid it can conform to whatever shape it needs to in order to accommodate for the most fries possible the fill rate for this serving was about 57.5 so if you're one of those people who gets really bummed out about all the empty space that you find when you open up a bag of doritos the mcdonald's small fry is the order for you the last metric we want to consider for fry efficiency is caloric load against cost what's getting me the most calories for my dollar well most of us are trying to minimize our calories in the event of an apocalypse where you want to stash fries and make sure you pick the most calorically dense version for the best price i got you covered right now this one is arby's in a landslide as they take three of the top five spots in calories per cent so reach for those small and curlies if you're doomsday prepping and want some old french fries to be a part of that for some reason and with that we tabulate our results taking into consideration total value and cost per gram fill ratio of the container and calories percent spent are optimized french fried champion is oh man not another drum roll gag 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. our runner-up was the arby's medium with 22 points and in last place was the chick-fil-a medium waffle fry with just eight points overall and never never never order an arby's large if you're ordering at arby's always order a medium so there you have it friends wendy's large fries and arby's medium the two most efficient fry purchases of them all the last real question i'm left with today is whether dipping your large wendy's fries in a frosty means you're genius or disgusting oh and the other question i have is if that subscribe button remains unclicked consider remedying that right now in case you didn't know this is just one of five videos that we've released as part of our channel launched today so keep going keep watching you are only 20 of the way there you can do it achieve full completion my friends i believe in you if you manage to watch all five today you get the theorist seal of approval seriously we would love to have you as a subscriber as we strike out into this new and delicious world of food science and edutainment if you made it this far into the video you must have liked what you saw right so nothing is preventing you from smashing that subscribe button right now so do it do it please please hit subscribe it would be nice if this channel did well i'm really enjoying doing food theories please help this channel be a success but hey that's just a theory a food theory bon appetite

Channel: The Food Theorists

Views: 4,011,335

Rating: 4.9316468 out of 5

Keywords: fries, mcdonald's, mcdonalds, mcdonald's fries, burger king, wendy's, wendys, chick-fil-a, chick fil a, arby's, arbys, fast food, eat the menu, french fries recipe, french fries, fast food challenge, fast food hack, food hack, life hack, money hack, rosanna pansino, how to cake it, mr cake, nerdy nummies, food, food science, food myth, food myths, food theorists, food theory, game theory, game theorists, film theory, film theorists, matpat, matpat theory, matpat new channel

Id: c_jnZkVlNtw

Length: 14min 58sec (898 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 23 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Mrhiddenlotus]

Ew, why are they giving money to Chic-fil-a