With large, national (and often international) burger chains, it’s understandable to be skeptical about quality. After all, even with fast casual restaurants versus fast food restaurants, you don’t often expect the menus to use food sourced from local farms. That said, you should be able to expect a reasonable level of quality, and even some chain restaurants use fresh ingredients instead of pulling from a convenient stash of frozen foods from giant freezers. Five Guys Burgers and Fries is one of the more prominent fast casual burger chains, with some pretty substantial revenue to match. A Five Guys may have lots of peanuts, but does it have fresh beef patties too?
In fact, Five Guys marketing makes a big deal of how it never freezes its burgers. Across its social media and on its website, the fast food chain frequently restates: “There are no freezers in Five Guys locations, just coolers.” Instead, the meat sits in a large refrigerator for up to 30 hours, which means that the beef inside your burger hasn’t been inside the restaurant for more than a day and a half at most. Ground beef is safe inside of the fridge for about two days maximum, so the burger in your hands should indeed be fresh, as should the French fries.
Five Guys kitchens have no freezers
The tradeoff is that you can never request how your Five Guys burger is cooked, because the burgers are always cooked well done. You need to be diligent with fresh, unfrozen meat, and the chain has said that sticking to well done burgers ensures the food always meets health code standards (it also keeps the burgers consistent). To ensure beef is completely safe, the CDC recommends cooking at 160 degrees Fahrenheit, which is indeed the temperature of a well-done burger. Beyond that, the other tradeoff for fresh beef is that Five Guys is some of the priciest fast food around, but that seems to be reflected in its ingredients.
Is Five Guys the only fast casual restaurant that doesn’t freeze its beef? Shake Shack avoids frozen ground beef, and In-N-Out Burger also proudly advertises that it doesn’t use any frozen, pre-packaged, or even microwaved food. Meanwhile, bigger fast food chains like McDonald’s do regularly freeze their burgers, and Burger King only claims that its sesame-seed buns are never frozen. Five Guys may be a fairly large burger chain, with about 1,500 locations total, and that comes with a reputation for cheaply made food, so it’s a relief that the burgers do appear to be fresh and thoroughly unfrozen.
