The Fast Food Chain With The Worst Chocolate Milkshake, Hands Down

While fast food spots cycle through buzzy new drinks with protein and trendy flavors, a classic chocolate milkshake will always have a place on the menu. Grabbing a chocolate shake from a fast food drive-thru is timeless — but not necessarily consistent or predictable. A homemade blender shake, an old-timey diner shake, and a fast food milkshake are all going to be a little different. But even among fast food chains themselves, there's lots of disparity.

A good chocolate milkshake should be cold and thick (but not so thick you can't drink it through a straw), distinctly chocolatey, smooth, and not sickly sweet. It's a difficult balance to achieve, but there are some special milkshake ingredients that can help you get there. When we think of a great shake, we look to classic favorites like Shake Shack. What sets Shake Shack's milkshakes apart from the rest is that they're made using a hand-spun method. This means the ingredients are manually mixed together, fresh, every time. In comparison, some less-appealing shakes are those that come from a machine — the texture and flavor difference is noticeable.

In our own ranking of 14 fast food chain chocolate milkshakes, Hardee's ranked dead last. Despite Hardee's clever branding of its shakes as "Hand-Scooped," a characteristic that applies only to the ice cream component, the milkshakes themselves are still made via machine, which could have contributed to their downfall. The shake wasn't just disappointing — it was actively unpleasant, especially when compared to better-executed (and often better-priced) shakes made with higher-quality ice cream and chocolate.

A milkshake is a precarious balance of texture and flavor. The shake needs to be cold enough to hold its thickness but not so frozen that it becomes icy, and though melting is inevitable, it ideally should stay thick for as long as possible without getting liquidy. This stability can usually be achieved with high-quality ice cream, which keeps the shake creamy and smooth.

With any recipe, the higher quality the ingredients are, the better the end result will be. Hardee's allegedly uses a chocolate syrup with an ingredient list including high fructose corn syrup, artificial flavors, and cocoa powder (more corn syrup than cocoa). Of course, using real (or more) cocoa would likely give the drink a bolder, more satisfying chocolate flavor. The best milkshake we tasted was Smashburger's, which was hand-spun and made with Häagen-Dazs ice cream — famously one of the best premium store-bought ice cream brands. It's an ideally rich, creamy ice cream made with premium cocoa. So, it's no surprise that Hardee's additive-laden syrup couldn't compete.

Hardee's labels its shakes as "Hand-Scooped," but this is decidedly different from hand-spun. Sure, the ice cream itself is scooped, but it's simply machine-mixed with milk and a flavored syrup. So, the chocolate shake is a generic vanilla ice cream base coupled with that artificially chocolate syrup. As such, it's no big surprise that we were left wanting more chocolate flavor here. As for its sloshy texture, we'd chalk it up to low-quality ice cream and over-churning.