Secrets Your Favorite Fast Food Chains Don’t Want You to Know
The fast food universe is an interesting one. Every day, millions of customers walk into outposts of fast food chains all across the globe, place their order, and walk away with exact copies of the same dish folks are eating at (almost) every other location, all of which are assembled in the blink of an eye. But it’s a lot more difficult than it looks to maintain that level of consistency across the board, and there are some tricks (and some other secrets) involved in the process that fast food restaurants would probably prefer you didn’t know about.
Secrets Your Favorite Fast Food Chains Don’t Want You to Know Gallery
When you place your fast food order, a whole lot of interesting things happen behind the scenes that you don’t see. While you can always catch a glimpse of the fries being scooped into the container (that’s within view for a reason), everything else back there looks like a high-tech jumble, though it’s actually very organized. Every component of every dish has its own place, in a specific location to make it as easy as possible to locate and use. At most fast food locations, hot items like burger patties and chicken nuggets are made in advance and kept warm in a heating tray for a set amount of time; after that they need to be thrown away (or repurposed, which we’ll get to later).
In short, working at a fast food restaurant is completely different from working at any other type of restaurant. There’s no garde manger to prepare the appetizers, no saucier in the back mixing up the béchamel sauce. A fast-food restaurant functions like a well-oiled machine, with a system that’s easily scalable and replicable across the board.
In order to maintain what is actually a pretty high level of quality while also keeping costs down, fast food chains need to implement some procedures that are less than savory, but recently a handful of former employees took to Reddit to give us a glimpse behind the scenes. So read on for some of their most shocking confessions, as well as a handful of other menu hacks, tips, and tricks that fast food chains would probably prefer you didn’t know about.
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