The Most Overhyped Fast Food Items Of 2025 So Far

Innovation is constant in the world of fast food. Most major chains are perpetually supplementing their reliable favorites with new items or limited-time promotions, usually consisting of foods or drinks at least a little outside the norm. Sometimes those items are better than a chain's standard fare — for example, Milk Bar Birthday Cake Churros, which Taco Bell previewed on its creative and tasty Live Más Live 2025 Menu, were an early highlight of 2025 — but plenty of new fast food items are straight up duds.

Particularly frustrating are cases where a fast food item seems promising but falls short of its potential. Between my professional experience as a fast food reviewer, my own personal interest in trying new things, and prevailing opinions among users discussing fast food online, I compiled this list of new additions or limited-time promotions from roughly the first half of 2025 that just didn't live up to expectations. Each of the following, then, is one of the most overhyped fast food items of 2025 so far.

Steak 'n Shake was already in steady decline when it announced, in January 2025, that it would start frying its french fries in beef tallow. Between 2018 and early 2025, more than 200 Steak 'n Shake locations had closed, so this move was clearly intended to attract new customers. McDonald's, notably, used to cook french fries in beef tallow, and older McDonald's aficionados like Revisionist History podcast host Malcolm Gladwell still covet that old recipe. Plus, in an era where fearmongering over so-called seed oils is growing, there are certain customers who perceive beef tallow as a healthier alternative.

After Steak 'n Shake announced its beef tallow fries on the X platform, the chain attempted to curry favor with supporters of the second Trump administration by, for example, partnering with Tesla and hosting Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Complicating this already divisive marketing, the all-important beef tallow fries are not actually free of seed oils. According to reporting that food content creator Bobby Parrish shared on Instagram, Steak 'n Shake's fries are prepared with ingredients like soybean oil, canola oil, and corn syrup before they're frozen and shipped to stores — it's only then that they're cooked in pure beef tallow. So, Steak 'n Shake is ultimately courting anti-seed oil customers despite serving fries that are, in fact, made with seed oils. There are at least three other restaurants where you can still order beef tallow fries: Portillo's, Smashburger, and Buffalo Wild Wings.

Even Taco Bell newbies know that Taco Bell makes great sauce — their standard Mild, Hot, and Fire sauces are all among the best in fast food. Digging through customization options on the Taco Bell app opens the door to even more excellent options, like Spicy Ranch or Creamy Jalapeño. So, it was a bit uncharacteristic when, in February 2025, Taco Bell debuted a limited-time lineup of five menu items revolving around a bizarre and unsatisfying Caliente Sauce. These five new menu items all incorporated Cantina Chicken, a protein Taco Bell introduced the prior year to its permanent menu. Plus, Caliente Sauce was available during the promotion as a customization option on regular menu items.

Rather than foregrounding an extreme level of spice like its name suggests, the Caliente Sauce tasted like orangey citrus more than anything else. Simply put, it didn't go well on anything on the Taco Bell menu, be it a Cantina Chicken item or not, and was a rare miss for one of the leaders in the fast food chain sauce game. When I reviewed Taco Bell's Toasted Cheddar Street Chalupas and Caliente Cantina Chicken Nacho Fries in early 2025, I was similarly disappointed, so it's safe to say Taco Bell had an overall rough start to the year.

Popeyes chose April 1, 2025 to announce its Pickle Menu, but a prank this was not. For a limited time, Popeyes customers could order wings coated in a Pickle Glaze, a Pickle Glaze Sandwich, fried pickles, and even a Pickle Lemonade. For what it's worth, Popeyes delivered on the premise of most of these items. The Pickle Glaze on the wings, for example, made them taste great at first, before becoming a little hard to eat in their entirety, because they were so pickle-y. While maybe not ideal, those wings were a big swing, and in the safe world of fast food, big swings are, at least, commendable.

The Pickle Glaze Chicken Sandwich, on the other hand, was a flat out disappointment. At fault was an insufficient quantity of sauce. This was something my partner and I both experienced on our individual sandwiches, and an issue recounted by both hosts and guest on an episode of the Doughboys podcast. So, even if these are all anecdotal examples, this was far from a one-time issue. Ultimately, the combination of subtly strange, artificially pickle-y sauce and real pickle slices confused more than it brought joy. That phenomenon was enough to make the Pickle Glaze Sandwich outright worse than the default Popeyes Chicken Sandwich. If a limited-time item provides no benefit over its full-time cousin, then it's doesn't serve much of a purpose — especially, in this case, when the sandwich was overshadowed by three superior pickle-forward menu items.

While the Frosty has pretty much always been a staple of the Wendy's menu, twists on the classic Frosty formula have only recently become commonplace. In 2024, for example, Wendy's introduced a springtime Orange Dreamsicle Frosty, and just a few months later debuted a summertime Triple Berry flavor. A Wendy's and Girl Scout Cookie collaborative Thin Mint Frosty, which the chain released for a limited time in February 2025, differed in one key way from its predecessors: it used a standard chocolate or vanilla Frosty as its base, to which a swirl of crumbled cookies was added.

This mash-up of a classic cookie and a timeless fast food treat looked better on paper than it worked in practice. A big part of what makes the Frosty uniquely good is its consistency — it's not quite ice cream and it's not quite a milkshake. Grainy, crumbled cookie just didn't complement the signature Frosty character all that well. Plus, while bites with ample cookie swirl tasted decent, Frosties are pretty thick, making an even distribution of that cookie swirl practically impossible.

In the wake of the Thin Mint Frosty, Wendy's decided to double down on the idea of a Frosty with mix-ins. Just months later, the chain announced a line-up of three new interpretations of this idea, alongside three frosties with flavored sauces. So, even if the Thin Mints Frosty was a failure, Wendy's has at least a couple more opportunities to get the add-ins idea right.

McDonald's debuted its latest bagel sandwiches in some U.S. test markets in 2024, but it was in February 2025 that the chain made bagels available at locations nationwide. Customers could choose between egg and cheese; bacon, egg and cheese; and steak, egg, and cheese options.

These items aren't bad, per se, but they're handily worse than every other kind of breakfast sandwich on the McDonald's menu. Just like Taco Bell offers its own unique interpretation of Mexican food, the McDonald's bagel is a sort of Franken-bagel. It's not not a bagel, but it's a cheaper, more processed take on the comparatively more authentic version. For one, the McDonald's bagel is tiny. It's also lighter and gummier than usual. Simply put, it wouldn't properly satisfy a bagel craving. McDonald's breakfast may well be the best — or at least most classic — breakfast in fast food, on the strength of its biscuits, McMuffins, and McGriddles. The middling, sort of strange bagel sandwiches aren't terrible, but there's no reason to order one over any of the three superior types of breakfast sandwiches.

Some sections of the expansive menu at Sonic are best avoided. Its chicken-based items, for example, are of a noticeably low quality and not nearly as tasty as its burgers. One highlight, meanwhile, is its variety of slushes. They're nothing fancy, really just consisting of water, ice, and flavored syrup in their basest form. But with so many flavors available and at a low price point, they're at least a solid step or two up from standard soda fountain sodas.

However, the Mashed review of Sonic's Tajín Strawberry Mangonada Slush — an item the chain debuted in February 2025 — found this particular slush lacking. At fault was its halfhearted commitment to its very concept. First of all, a mangonada-inspired drink should probably be pretty mango-forward, but it was strawberry that dominated the flavor of the Tajín Strawberry Mangonada Slush. The Tajín component was also paltry, suggesting that Sonic was afraid to foreground slightly funky flavors like mango and Tajín, leaning on a safer strawberry flavor instead. Compromises like this satisfy no one, letting down mangonada connoisseurs and leaving customers with the sense that a regular strawberry slush would have sufficed instead.

Just like the Frosty collab between Wendy's and Girl Scout Cookies the very same month, in February 2025, KFC announced two limited-time menu items made in collaboration with an outside food brand as well — Mike's Hot Honey in this case. The chain offered either its bone-in chicken or boneless tenders coated in Mike's Hot Honey. Since bone-in chicken and tenders are pretty lateral to one another — the better of the two simply coming down to individual preference — it's safe to say that the two kinds of Mike's Hot Honey Chicken were equivalently disappointing.

According to comments from Reddit users familiar with the product, Mike's Hot Honey Chicken did, at least, deliver on the premise of KFC chicken coated in Mike's Hot Honey. But what made these items particularly disappointing was a conspicuous lack of spice in that hot honey. Since honey packets are already a staple of the KFC menu, a hot honey menu item should offer something significantly different from just coating a piece of chicken in the chain's default honey. This was not, ultimately, the case with the syrupy sweet Mike's Hot Honey Chicken.

While signs that Subway might not be around much longer have persisted since at least 2020, the sandwich chain has been treading water since then and stuck around as a staple of the fast food landscape. One fun wrinkle to its menu in 2025 was the introduction of the Doritos Footlong Nachos, consisting of Doritos chips topped with nacho accoutrements. While these might sound a little iffy, customers who tried them generally reported enjoying them. Funnily enough, it was a type of sandwich — the very thing Subway should do well — that missed the mark in 2025.

Mashed reviewed Subway's hot honey subs upon their release in March, and found them altogether unremarkable. For proteins, customers could choose between rotisserie chicken and pepperoni. While neither option impressed, pepperoni was the worse of the two. That said, both sandwiches were missing something, with the chicken version failing to spotlight its hot honey sauce and the pepperoni version simply lacking enough meat or other ingredients to maintain a consistently decent sandwich experience. On one hand, this is indicative of the broader fact that hot honey is probably a trend that fast food chains should leave in the rearview mirror. Furthermore, since the Doritos Footlong Nachos were an unlikely hit for the chain in 2025, there's reason to believe Subway's future success might not be new sandwiches at all, but its comparatively stranger and more exciting practice of taking other kinds of foods and foot long-ifying them.

When the Dunkin' chain gave up its iconic Dunkin' Donuts moniker, the move was clearly intended to spotlight the fact that there's plenty more than just donuts worth ordering off its menu. Among its non-donut offerings are various hot breakfast items, like a croissant sandwich, hash browns, and even "Snackin' Bacon" — a straight up order of seasoned, crisped up bacon strips in a bag. In March 2025, Dunkin' debuted Ham & Swiss Pretzel Sliders, consisting of the two sandwich ingredients in its name, plus honey mustard, on a King's Hawaiian Pretzel Slider Bun.

It turned out that this lunch-ier item from Dunkin' just wasn't on the level of its generally solid breakfast menu. Responsible for this item missing the mark were both flavor and textural imbalances. The former was a factor of the sweet King's Hawaiian roll flavor overpowering a meager serving of honey mustard. Meanwhile, for whatever reason, the sliders were served just a little too soft and mushy. At least two separate Reddit users dedicated threads on the Dunkin' subreddit to the fact that they did not, in fact, enjoy the Ham & Swiss Pretzel Sliders. While there's a somewhat sizable list of things Dunkin' does well other than just donuts, it's safe to say pretzel sliders are not a part of it.

To some, Panera is just glorified hospital food. To others, the chain is a reliable lunch option with healthier fare than many of its competitors. In any case, Panera isn't exactly known for being exciting, but that may well be a reputation the chain is on the way to changing. For example, a Panera-branded purse, called the BAGuette bag, had a viral moment online in 2023. Even in 2025, the chain's regulars had good things to say about a limited-time item called the Asiago Bagel Stack. However, Croissant Toast Sandwiches — another 2025 promotion — decidedly did not contribute to this forward momentum.

Panera offered two kinds of Croissant Toast Sandwiches: one approximating a croque monsieur, and another called the Fromage Croissant Toast, with similar ingredients but sans meat. In a Reddit thread about the promotion, user MLCUSA found everything else on both sandwiches perfectly enjoyable, but the croissant toast itself to be so dry to the point it was off-putting. Two other notable issues were the fact customers were not allowed to sub the croissant bread for an alternative option, and the fact the items' prices — relative to their sizes — were higher than normal for the chain. Panera's reputation may still be changing for the better, but the Croissant Toast Sandwiches failed to help the cause.