Fast Food Chains That Serve The Highest And Lowest Quality Cheese Sauce

No one questions the deliciousness of fast food cheese sauce when it shows up on a burger or an order of fries. It's designed for maximum enjoyment, obviously, even though each outlet gives a slightly different take on what cheese sauce can be. With that kind of variety comes a vast scope of quality levels, ranging from natural ingredients that provide a wholesome spread to chemical additives that diminish the caliber of what you're paying for — and what you're consuming.

The biggest fast food chains with cheese sauce as a featured part of their menus also share the ingredients used, providing a very clear picture of the highest and lowest quality versions of creamy queso and gooey cheddar melt. We broke down the components and categorized cheese sauce from each restaurant to help you be better informed about your choices. Whether you're in it for the flavor alone or you're hoping there's more kitchen craft than food science in the mix, this breakdown gives you the inside scoop on the quality of each fast food chain's particular cheese sauce creation to help you decide.

Hot dog eatery Portillo's may not make its cheese sauce in-house, but that doesn't mean the outlet skimps on quality to maintain convenience. It actually provides a more thoughtful version of premade cheese sauce that inspires customers to ask for the recipe. And when workers bring out the can it came in and share that it's actually Award Cuisine County Line Cheddar Cheese Sauce, jaws drop and tongues wag, for all the right reasons.

Award Cuisine packs mostly high quality ingredients into the can; cheddar cheese is the third element shown, after water and soybean oil — allowable since this is a sauce and needs to be smooth. There's also non-fat dry milk and butter, ramping up the dairy quotient without loads of weird thickeners. And then, just to make things extra fancy, there's another cheese blend tossed in, this one merging cheddar and blue cheese. Disodium Phosphate and DATEM, a food texturizer usually found in bread, show up in the "less than 2%" portion of the recipe, leaving plenty of space for the more wholesome components to shine. In total, it's a cheese sauce that aims for quality to give establishments like Portillo's a trustworthy cheese sauce for its hot dogs.

Arby's is one of the few fast food chains to use cheese sauce as a long-term ingredient in its sandwiches, most notably the chain's famous Beef 'n Cheddar. It's been around for ages, since first being added to the menu in 1978, and while there's no simple way to track down the cheese sauce recipe used in those days, the chain readily shares its current cheese sauce ingredient list online. This was how we discovered just how low the quality of this undeniably tasty stuff really is. It may not diminish the flavor, but the worry-free enjoyment factor definitely takes a hit.

What makes this silky-smooth roast beef spread problematic is the use of chemical additives like sodium stearoyl lactylate and sodium hexametaphosphate. If you've ever made cheese sauce at home, you know multi-syllable unpronounceable elements like these never come into the picture. And if cheese sauce can be made without them, then Arby's is making a choice to include them. Even if they help achieve that oh-so-queso consistency, they drag down the overall quality factor, regardless of what cheesy fan favorite sandwiches Arby's brings back to the menu.

Culver's doesn't mess around when it comes to cheese in any form, from offering premium cheese curds as a signature side order to using one of the purest cheese sauce recipes in the fast food world. As with its curds, Culver's opts for real cheese and dairy ingredients in its cheese sauce, boasting of the real Wisconsin cheese that serves as a wholesome base. Butter and non-fat dry milk add to the richness, just like you'd make yourself if you had an inkling to whip up an easy homemade creamy cheese sauce.

Read further down and you'll find disodium phosphate (an emulsifier deemed safe by the FDA) among the ingredients, as well as xanthan gum (also a food-safe emulsifier, one that provides a bit of soluble fiber) to thicken the sauce, but they're both near the bottom of the list. Overall, Culver's keeps its high-quality standards with its creamy burger-topper and fry-dipper.

You probably wouldn't expect drive-thru chain Sonic to make quality cheese sauce a top priority on its menu. To begin with, the breakdown of this creamy, spicy substance seems like one of the more favorable cheese sauce combinations on the scene. It's the coloring agents tossed in to give the sauce its vibrant hue that makes this a condiment to skip. 

The ingredients list starts with water, soybean oil, pasteurized milk, and whey —  all easily recognizable components that combine to form the cheese base. Whey protein concentrate and modified food starch serve to thicken the base, while mustard flour and Worcestershire sauce are on hand to jazz up the flavor profile. Cheese cultures and enzymes add to the cheesiness, and lactic and sorbic acids act as food-safe preservatives.

The objectionable substances here are the artificial colors Yellow #5 and Yellow #6; both have been targeted for phasing out by the FDA as of 2025. They do appear at the end of the list, under the "contains less than 2%" listing, but their mere presence in an otherwise sensible recipe reduces the sauce's overall quality.

Wendy's has made fresh food a foundational tenet for the company, offering real veggies like baked potatoes and premium salads. So it's no surprise that Dave's Place comes to the table with a high-quality cheese sauce that upholds the same standards. The chain primarily uses it for various potato dishes (such as cheese fries and baked potatoes), but you can rest assured that the sauce is a superior dipper for your crispy spud sticks.

For starters, Wendy's cheese sauce features cheddar cheese, plus butter, milk solids, and natural cheese flavors. The chain also tops the sauce with real cheddar. You wouldn't be wrong in hoping these food facts would be true for the majority of cheese-based sauces. Wendy's makes sure all customers can see what they're consuming by dropping the ingredients right on the online menu order. The listing also calls out every occurrence of milk in all caps to keep milk-sensitive guests well-informed.

Part of the reason we all love Taco Bell's queso is for its loosey-goosey fast food personality. It's a welcome part of the chain's nachos and cheese fries and jazzes up the chain's cheesy burritos, and for the most part, it tries its best to be an acceptable cheese sauce. There's nonfat milk and cheese whey making appearances at the beginning of the ingredients listing, with vegetable oil to help make the texture smooth, all of which gets this recipe off to a decent start.

But further down the line, a few thickeners — namely dipotassium phosphate and sodium stearoyl lactylate — appear in the "2% or less" section, but it begs the question: if you're adding oil to thin the sauce, why throw in additives to make it thick again? Isn't there a workaround that keeps things more pristine? Of course there is; other cheese sauces do fine without them. And since there's competition on the scene that keeps the quality higher, Taco Bell has no hope other than to fall on the lower-quality side of the scale.

Don't make the mistake of lumping Del Taco's cheese sauce in with Taco Bell's. Just because these two Tex-Mex huts both serve their queso-style sauce on similar selections doesn't mean they're made of the same stuff. In fact, the untold truth about Del Taco and the company's choice of cheese sauce formulation may be enough to keep you from ringing the Bell and singing for Del instead, especially if you're a cheese sauce-loving fool.

Queso sauce in the Del Taco world makes use of processed American white cheese and a cheddar cheese concentrate for flavor, made with two types of cream (regular and sweet), and butter. Pickled and green jalapeños give natural flavor and heat. There's also the presence of guar gum and xanthan gum, food-safe thickeners that come at the tail end of the list. But the wholesome nature of the main ingredients is one of the cleaner compositions we could find, giving Del Taco a gold star in the chain restaurant cheese sauce column.

Shake Shack goes one step further than just using top quality natural ingredients in its restaurant cheese sauce. Via its culinary director Mark Rosati, the chain also shares the recipe with the public, offering transparency like no other enterprise, at the risk of losing business to creative home cooks. There's even a helpful tutorial video to make it foolproof, a mighty generous move. It may even justify Shake Shack raising its prices for customers who'd rather have a fast food restaurant provide the cheese sauce instead ... but probably not. 

Following the recipe, you'll find refrigerator and pantry items that are both familiar and easy to pronounce. There's American and cheddar cheese; canola oil and heavy cream; white wine vinegar and white wine itself; plus jalapeños, onions, salt, and peppercorns. It's a simple, elegant combination that instills confidence in customers who'd love to smother their crinkle-cut fries in cheddary goodness but would rather it be made of actual food. In the kingdom of high-quality fast-food cheese sauces, Shake Shack steals the crown.

To zero in on the highest and lowest quality chain restaurant cheese sauces, we jumped straight into the restrictive list of eateries that even serve cheese sauce. Since there aren't too many, it was easy to get our arms around the best-known spots where cheese sauce or queso are featured items, either as a dipping sauce or a condiment on main dishes.

Once we had our list, we broke open the not-so-secret code for each chain's sauce. They're published on corporate websites, either attached to the menu items that contain cheese sauce or as part of the nutritional overview documentation. In the case of Shake Shack, the company dropped its recipe on social media as a marketing promo.

To separate the sauces into highest and lowest quality, we gauged the number of whole-food ingredients versus the chemical additives used as thickeners, flavorings, and texturizing agents. The sauces with a greater focus on cheese, dairy, and pantry-ready flavorings like spices were dubbed "highest quality." Sauces that incorporated oils and dairy stand-ins as well as chemical additives were dubbed "lowest quality," though all elements are considered food safe by FDA standards.