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, supersize, yeah!

Supersize, supersize, yeah!

This song's hopefully not gonna get flagged for copyright

Do people even know that reference anymore?

Is this- this- this a thing?

This is- this an old one

This is 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 bit so there's no need to go searching for that

No, leave that alone

That isn't a thing that really exists

As I got older, I got smarter and also poorer and I realized 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 US

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 supersized fry is really delivering us a supersized 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 backseat of the drive-thru

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 size 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-thrus

Woo!

We're gonna 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-N-Out or Whataburger

You guys can take those arguments to the comments section

The focus here is on covering 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 Arby's 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 honking 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 per cent of money that I'm spending

And the number of calories per cent I'm spending

Based on the nutritional facts given on each chain's website

To make sure that I'm getting the most calories for my bucks

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

Ooh, 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

Ugh, 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

Where 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 1.26 per gram

And the Wendy'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 underfill 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

While 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%

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