20 fast foods that employees say to avoid at all cost

By Faith Tap

April 27th, 2021

While fast-food restaurants aren’t known for their… shall we say “quality,” there are still some foods that are apparently worse than others. For most people, knowing which ones to avoid is nearly impossible. Thankfully, we have some insider information from some fast-food workers who tell us exactly which ones to avoid. Check out 20 of the best below!

1. Old bottles

Flickr - Londonmatt Source: Flickr - Londonmatt

This one is more management-based but still good to be aware of!

“Former BK employee of 6 years here. The food was actually good if it was fresh. The issue is the staff/management. Sauce bottles would never get completely emptied and cleaned. People wouldn’t change their gloves between doing different tasks, or would be texting with those gloves then make your food.”

2. Avoid the chili

One guy’s brother managed a Weinderschnitzel, and they catered lunch for local schools. The chili didn’t hit school standards, so they had to add meat. They would use old burgers, hot dogs, and whatever else they could find.

3. Moldy ice-cream

This story is downright gross:

“I was a shift supervisor at a fast food place and years later, I still refuse to eat anything with ice cream in it. The machine we had was always covered in mold and spoiled cream while the owner’s ‘fix’ was to scrape off a layer of mold and spray some Clorox on it.”

4. Bad Cheesecake for Blizzards

Flickr - RecoliRick Source: Flickr - RecoliRick

This just made me sick because I LOVE these:

“When the cheesecake gets low you’re supposed to fill it up a certain way where the new cheesecake goes on bottom and what’s left of the old stuff is put on top to ensure it’s used first and it all stays fresh. Well let me tell you that shit is like a brick after it’s been in the container long enough, you constantly take it out and put it back so it’s always thawing and refreezing and essentially freezing together. This is why absolutely NO ONE rotates the cheesecake. I once dropped the cheesecake container onto the tile and the chunk in bottom cracked in half and came out…. it had become almost like 98% mold. We’d been using it without rotating it for months.”

5. Rat flavored

Flickr - Ken Hawkins Source: Flickr - Ken Hawkins

This makes me never want to eat fried food again:

“I was doing my thing one night, and the restaurant owner is on the phone, trying to get his fryer filter repaired. He told me he’d been trying for weeks but the co was booked solid.

I’ve got a degree in engineering, so I said I’d check it out. I managed to get it apart, and get a look inside.

Inside were two large dead rats, or what was left of them, bones and fluff mostly. They had got in the machine via the purge pipe, and got stuck inside.

So for probably a month or two, all the fried food from this establishment had been cooked in oil that had been filtered through two rotting rats…”

6. Wendy’s chili

Flickr - Calgary Reviews Source: Flickr - Calgary Reviews

This is why you don’t get chili from a burger joint, I guess:

“If I had to complain about Wendy’s, it was the chili. All the meat contained in the chili is just hamburger meat that was too ambitiously thrown on the grill during busy hours that never ultimately got used for a hamburger. It gets cut up and thrown into the chili. Aside from that, we always kept things clean.” eyekwah2

Flickr - Randomographer Source: Flickr - Randomographer

Maybe skip the popcorn, next time?

“Had a job with AMC theaters… The oil is so gross. You’re basically ordering something that went through a machine built in the 70s that has accumulated layers and layers of oil residue. You can clean it a little bit, but you’re never going back to how it first looked. Everyday there’s like a new layer of ‘oil icing’ and the corners of the steel plates are where they really get stuck.” commenter37892

8. Grey ham slices

Flickr - Helen Penjam Source: Flickr - Helen Penjam

If you see meat this is pallid grey, avoid it:

“Ham on pizza. Worked at pizza hut done time ago and the ham would turn this disgusting gray color within a day or opening the package. You just couldn’t tell if it had been opened 24 his ago or 2 weeks ago. But, during cooking it returned to pink which always weirded me out.” Fusorfodder

9. Crispy Chicken

Flickr - theimpulsivebuy Source: Flickr - theimpulsivebuy

This one made me REALLY sad because the crispy chickens were my fav:

“Used to work at McDonald’s. Nobody ever ordered the crispy chicken. I’ve had it sit in the warmer from opening to changeover. Then from changeover when I ended my shift. Maybe it depends on the location, but the odds of getting one that’s been sitting there for an hour or two outweigh the odds that the table and grill people remembered it existed and changed it out when it started looking bad.” shadeplant

10. Roller hot dogs

Flickr - Willis Lam Source: Flickr - Willis Lam

These kinds of dogs can be found at gas stations, too!

“I worked at Orange Julius for my first job. We would cook hot dogs on the rotating grill for all to see. At the end of the day if they weren’t bought we were supposed to toss them. I mean they were almost burnt and wrinkly. The manager was there one day when we had three hotdogs left over…He put them in the fridge and told me to use them the next day in a chili or cheese dog where the customer couldn’t see the hotdog. To this day I still feel bad for the customer who received the chili dog the next morning since he was there. Thankfully he has rarely there and I would toss out those wrinkly fuckers at the end of the day.” exWiFi69

11. Moldy chocolate sauce

Flickr - sjephoto Source: Flickr - sjephoto

This is from a coffee chain in the area this person worked:

“I work at a chain coffee shop where we make our own in-house chocolate sauce. Sounds nice but it starts to mold within a few days. That shouldn’t be a problem since we go through chocolate and make more daily, however the chocolate sauce container only gets cleaned out properly if we run out during slow times. Otherwise we just dump fresh chocolate sauce on top and get right back to dealing with the rush.” Fantastic_Relief

12. Furry coleslaw

Flickr - stu_spivak Source: Flickr - stu_spivak

This seems to be true for any large-batch coleslaw:

“I have watched the hairiest men make coleslaw with no gloves, and for perspective, we make a giant tub at a time. You’re literally armpit-deep sometimes in this bin to mix it correctly…Please don’t eat the coleslaw.” buddyturner2014

13. A SECOND warning

If you still eat the chili after this, you are a madman:

“I worked at Wendy’s in high school. For me, that item is the chili.

Whenever a burger is cooked it is only considered “good” for a certain amount of time. So many minutes after cooking and the burger didn’t get used it would be thrown in a bucket next to the grill. At the end of each shift the person dumps all the old burgers into a larger bucket of old burgers which may or may not be covered. They also may be from xays prior. Overnight they chill, the grease congeals and the meat turns pretty grey and weird. This meat may not be frozen, but it is still pretty hard to break up. So the person making chili dumps it in a big colander, runs hot water over it, and mashes it into tiny pieces again.

Now the soggy, greyish, lukewarm day old burger meat is ready to be used in the chili.” MichelHollaback

14. Grilled chicken from Subway

Is it even chicken? We will never know.

“Former Subway Sandwiche Artist. I do not ever get the Grilled Chicken sub. More like chicken-shaped stamp energy block marinated in lukewarm tap water for 48 hours.” CliplessWingtips

15. I can’t believe it’s butter?

We’ve all heard of “I can’t believe it’s not butter” before, but this is a bit of the opposite. They can’t believe it IS butter:

“If people saw (and felt) the popcorn “butter” at AMC when I worked there you wouldn’t touch that whole stand, much less put that stuff in your body. To replace the butter we get this bag of yellow liquid that glows pink in the light to screw into the nozzle at the bottom. And somehow which I never understand, is that touching the outside of the plastic bag makes my hands super greasy. And when I say greasy, I have to SCRUB with a sponge for minutes to get most of it off and there is always some residue that remains.” runnerd81

16. Never replaced a brush

Flickr - Amy Stephenson Source: Flickr - Amy Stephenson

A paint job… for butter?

“Over a decade ago I worked at Little Caesar’s. The thing I refuse to eat (I eat there super rarely anyway) is the crazy bread. At our store and the other I worked at temporarily we used a paint brush to spread the garlic butter. The thing was that the paint brush was never fully clean so garlic butter from the previous days would still be on the brush.

I’d never seen the brush replaced in my nearly two years working there. It’s hardly surprising considering after we were robbed they still hadn’t put up security cameras in the three months following. At that point I decided to quit.” thedenimlord

17. Beef scraps

Anything made with roast beef? Isn’t that everything at Arby’s?!?

“Anything made with the ‘roast beef’ at Arby’s. It’s not a real beef roast. Instead, it’s a compressed block of beef scraps. It comes in a bag filled with beef broth, and you just warm the entire thing in the oven for a few hours. And once the compressed beef block is heated, you put it on the slicer and leave it under a heat lamp for hours to slowly desiccate.” Baruch_S

18. “Cut off the mold”

Flickr - Britta Gustafson Source: Flickr - Britta Gustafson

Ya, fast-food tomatoes are a QUICK pass for me:

“My best friend worked at a very popular sandwich fast food chain. Some of the tomatoes had mold on them so she went to throw them out. Her manager scolded her and told her if anything grows mold, you cut the mold off and still serve it so they don’t waste food.” airyeez

19. Pot-pie or die

Flickr - rob_rob2001 Source: Flickr - rob_rob2001

Who orders these, anyways?

“I worked at a kfc/Taco Bell while in high school for about 3 years. The chicken pot pie was made with old chicken that would be old from 3-4 days ago when we froze it. Nasty and we wouldn’t make more pot pies unless we ran out. (Ie the pot pie we made at 10am would be served at 8pm).” seahawks101777

20. Dairy Queen Tacos

Flickr - waferboard Source: Flickr - waferboard

Those three words don’t sound great together, do they? This makes it even worse:

“I worked at a Dairy Queen where the gm would rinse returned bitten off of hamburgers, rinse the meat, and grind it for tacos. For those who didn’t know, Texas Dairy Queen’s do have tacos.” agoroguy

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Source: Reddit – r/AskReddit, On the Line

About the Author

Faith Tap

Faith Tap (FaithTap.com LLC) was launched in 2013 and has the strong belief that inspiring stories have a great impact on the lives of their readers. Our faithful followers agree and have responded by our website showing rapid growth in popularity as our stories have been shared around the world reaching over 30 million users monthly. We strive to be an oasis from negative and controversial news and bring hope and smiles to every person we touch.

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