Fast Food Restaurants That Serve Low-Quality Beef

No one orders from Domino's expecting gourmet pizza. After all, this is the place to go when you want cheap, fast pies, but surely you still want the ingredients in that pizza to be decent enough. However, Domino's hasn't received a lot of compliments when it comes to quality, especially in the past few years. Commenters on a 2022 Reddit thread discussed a perceived decline in quality in the chain, although one commenter noted that staff turnover leads to inexperienced workers trying to make your pizza. Another thread focuses on the beef toppings, with comments about the beef being "gross," "the worst," and "like 70 percent soy filler." Even Domino's itself has admitted the pizza isn't that good. In 2017, the company created an ad campaign meant to apologize for its reputation for terrible food.

But the chain's beef faces another quality issue: the use of antibiotics. Domino's no longer uses poultry from flocks treated with antibiotics, but its beef supplies are another matter. Domino's says that it intends to switch to beef from herds raised without antibiotics that are medically important to humans. However, that changeover doesn't seem to have happened yet. Even after the switch, the meat still won't be from completely antibiotic-free herds.

Popular YouTuber MrBeast partnered with Virtual Dining Concepts in 2020 to develop a MrBeast burger that would be made in ghost kitchens, where companies contract with existing restaurants or kitchen rental spaces to get their food made. MrBeast has one brick-and-mortar location in New Jersey but, in the rest of the country, ordering a MrBeast burger means you'll get something probably made in the kitchen of a local burger joint. Workers in this ghost kitchen will have made the burger according to a set of instructions provided by Virtual Dining Concepts.

Unfortunately, when you don't know exactly where the food is made, that also means you can't always control the quality of the ingredients, nor can you easily control the quality of how it's been prepared. To paraphrase the old saying, too many cooks seem to have spoiled the burger. Customers have complained about seemingly everything, from the taste of the burger to how they were put together, with one Redditor calling the burger "a waste of money" and saying that the meat seemed almost steamed. In 2023, MrBeast sued Virtual Dining Concepts to end their contract, citing customers who publicly called out the burgers.

White Castle certainly holds a special place in many people's memories, which is kind of odd when you see how many fans also complain of gastrointestinal upset after eating a few of the chain's sliders. While White Castle details how it works with suppliers and its quality-control standards, others paint a rather ugly picture. Many agree that the chain's sliders are delicious but then talk about the digestive consequences at length.

What's behind these unfortunate and oftentimes rather disgusting reactions? The consensus appears to be the rather high amounts of grease, fat, and sodium that the small sliders contain. Some speculate that gut microbes may be reacting to the grease and digesting it inefficiently, leading to excessive gas. And of course, the small burgers are easy to eat, which might just lead some people to eat too many and place a strain on their digestive systems that could be too much to handle. 

Whataburger is another chain where the beef would be considered low-quality, at least so long as you're trying to avoid antibiotics. Whataburger was last seen on the Chain Reaction IV scorecard (a joint survey that ranks chains' use of meats from antibiotic-using sources) in 2018. There, it received a grade of F for not having any known antibiotics policy in place. Though it hasn't appeared on the latest Chain Reaction score, the company still doesn't seem to have a clear stance on antibiotics as of 2023.

Whataburger is often seen as a competitor to In-N-Out. Both are regional faves (traditionally, Whataburger in Texas and In-N-Out in California) that are constantly compared to each other and have very loyal fanbases. So, you'd think that this would mean that there wouldn't be any complaints about the quality of the beef at the Whataburger chain. However, many commenters have questioned what's going on with Whataburger beef patties and the company's food in general. This Reddit thread starts with a complaint that the beef was dry. Later commenters chime in to agree, stating that the patty seems to be thinner than it once was, while many state that quality overall has declined both due to the COVID-19 pandemic and to Whataburger's owners selling their majority stake in the company to an investment firm.

Perhaps Arby's just wants to sell roast beef sandwiches, but instead finds itself the target of some pretty gross rumors. Possibly the weirdest is that the chain's roast beef is made out of some sort of gel, liquid, or even powder. Fact-checkers have debunked this notion pretty thoroughly and confirmed that you're getting actual meat. Yes, the meat is typically packaged in a viscous broth, but that's still not a fake meat component that somehow congeals to form the meat itself.

However, in a thread about things even fast food employees won't eat, this Redditor says that the chain's roast beef is really a bunch of beef scraps pressed into a block instead of an actual hunk of whole beef that's been roasted and then sliced. In Arby's defense, a reply further down in that thread noted that this is what a lot of deli meat is like, and other Redditors didn't seem all that concerned. Then again, Arby's received an F grade on the latest Chain Reaction survey for not having a clear and publicly-available policy about how it stands on antibiotics in beef.

As they say, once more, with feeling: as of 2023, Pizza Hut doesn't have a known public-facing policy about the use of antibiotics in its beef. Therefore, it got an F on the Chain Reaction survey. It does have a policy about avoiding antibiotics in its poultry supply, but the lack of action regarding the similar use of antibiotics in beef nevertheless places the company's beef products in the lower-quality category. Remember, after all, that you don't have to ingest the antibiotics yourself for them to promote the spread of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. It's the overuse of antibiotics overall that's the problem, and if companies continue to buy beef from suppliers that don't restrict antibiotics, it may well create the impression that there is no need for those suppliers to change.

Look through Pizza Hut's ingredient list, at least, and the beef products don't seem all that bad. But there are more additives here than you may want to dine on, such as silicon dioxide that's been added to the steak to prevent caking. And there have been complaints about the taste of the beef that are harder to ignore. Take the words of this Redditor, who claims to be a Pizza Hut employee. They said that they could barely eat a piece of the chain's beef when their manager asked them to test it, calling it nothing short of "absolute garbage."