8 Fast Food Salads, Ranked From Worst To Best

Hitting up a fast food restaurant doesn't mean you have to stick with the usual burgers, sandwiches, and fries comprising the bulk of many drive-thru menus. I do love a good cheeseburger, but more than that, I love having options. When I want something fresh and veggie-packed, a burger won't cut it. Happily, salads are on offer at a number of quick-eat spots, and I was excited to taste-test and rank the greener options at my local fast food joints. Restaurant salads tend to taste better than homemade – the ingredients are fresh, the dressings made in-house — and I was curious to see which, if any, fast food salads provided that same effect, but at drive-thru prices. I've already ranked every salad from Schlotzsky's and discovered that just because a spot is fast-casual doesn't mean it can't offer some phenomenal salads. 

I picked up eight salads, two each from Wendy's, Chick-fil-A, Bojangles, and Zaxby's (McDonald's stopped selling salads in 2020), and compared them in terms of their flavor, freshness, and value for money. Two fast food spots excelled with their veggie-forward offerings in nearly every way; another brand was okay but overpriced, and the last one ... well, at least it was cheap. 

Bojangles can be found in 21 U.S. states, with the majority of its restaurants peppered throughout the Carolinas; it's a big deal here. The Boj' specializes in its "Famous Chicken 'n Biscuits," but it also serves salads and rice bowls for folks seeking a meal beyond the typical offerings. The Chicken Supremes salad, according to the menu, features crispy chicken tenders atop a Romaine and iceberg mix, along with grape tomatoes, cucumbers, and a Jack and cheddar cheese blend. It sounded tasty, especially for only costing $7.10.

The salad contained what it was meant to, but the execution was uninspired, and it could have been fresher. There were exactly two cucumber rounds and two grape tomatoes; the salad was disproportionately heavy on the lettuce, which was limp, and the tomato I taste-tested was overripe and slightly bitter. That said, the flavor of the chicken wasn't bad — it was pleasantly seasoned and fairly crisp. In all, though, it wasn't enough to save this salad from the last-place ranking.

The Bojangles Cajun Filet Salad is the fraternal twin to the brand's Supremes Salad, with the same Romaine and iceberg base, shredded cheese blend, cukes, and tomatoes. This one, however, is topped with a seasoned filet of chicken breast that ups the price to $7.19. Even up close, the two salads look pretty much the same, down to the meagreness of the veggie selection (two cucumber slices, two grape tomatoes).

My complaints about the Supremes salad hold true for this one as well — mushy tomatoes, wilted lettuce — but I will say this for the Cajun Filet Salad: the chicken is pretty nicely seasoned and acceptably crisp. I wouldn't exactly call it Cajun — there's only a hint of spice — but it's not overly salty, which is a fault I found with other fast food salad proteins. However, for only a dollar or two more, there are other salads in this ranking that far outshine this one.

Zaxby's is a Southeast staple specializing in what you might call the food world's red-headed stepchicken: chicken fingers — or Fingerz, technically. The brand's marketing team seems to enjoy playing up the Z in the chain's name; it serves not salads, but Zalads. And of the four featured on the menu, one that I chose was the good old House Zalad. This was a fair-sized platter of mixed greens, cucumbers, tomatoes, cheddar Jack cheese, and fried onions, along with a piece of Texas toast, all for $10.49.

Unlike the Bojangles salads, there was a satisfying quantity of vegetables, all nicely sliced, and the lettuce mix was passably crunchy. The chicken was very salty, but the flavor was good. The fried onions, a fun change from the norm, brought a good crunch, though I didn't detect much of their flavor (perhaps due to the saltiness of the protein). For the price, though, I'd expect a little more of a wow factor to the salad, perhaps a little avocado or something. In the end, I rank it as okay, leaning on the positive side of that adjective.

When I saw that Wendy's has a taco salad on its menu, I had pleasant visions of the old Taco Bell Taco Salad from yesteryears (remember that crunchy taco shell bowl? Ahh). Imagine my surprise when I was presented with a smallish, meatless side salad and a cup of something hot and dark. Wendy's version of a Taco Salad, you see, is a bit different from anything else in this fast food salad ranking. The chain's website describes the salad as "ripe for customization;" you can apparently top it in a multitude of ways. One of the keys to the dish, though, is pouring the chili over the salad greens.

Before dousing the salad with chili, I noted that the tomatoes weren't the freshest, though the lettuce was crisp. As you may imagine, inundating it with chili made it limp, but crunch was added back with the mini tortilla chips included with the ensemble. (My salad didn't come with sour cream or salsa dressing, which would have fit beautifully.)

The chili was good — mild but flavorful — and the onions in it contrasted well with the lettuce, corn, cheese, and other toppings. However, all this together felt a little disconnected. This unusual combo is not what I want when I get a salad, but I can see people loving this, especially for $8.39.

I appreciate the idea behind Zaxby's Blue Zalad – there's nothing else quite like it out there in fast food land. For $10.49, you get the mixed greens spiked with red cabbage and carrots, tomatoes, and your choice of grilled or fried chicken. The blueness of the salad comes from blue cheese and the dressing that officially accompanies it (though I swapped mine out for the same ranch I tested most of the other salads with). I opted for the fried chicken over grilled, as it comes with a Buffalo Garlic Glaze that sounded intriguing.

As with Zaxby's House Zalad, this salad ranks fairly high on freshness. In terms of flavor, this one, with its blue cheese funk and slight kick from the Buffalo sauce on the chicken, had that missing "wow" element that the House salad lacked. Overall, this is not a bad salad, but it's not amazing, either. The elements don't quite cohere; it's a lot of tasty stuff all thrown together but not working toward a unified dish — kind of like the Wendy's Taco Salad, but more up my alley.

Despite being nearly a dollar less than the Zaxby's salads at $9.69 (and in a smaller container), both of the Chick-fil-A salads I reviewed had a wholesome fullness to them. This Spicy Southwest Salad was beautifully put together, with lots of grape tomatoes, chicken, and other key ingredients. It's a filling meal, satisfying both physically and visually.

The tomatoes had the perfect toothsome consistency and fresh flavor, the lettuce was crisp, and a bite with all the fixings — the aforementioned ingredients plus black beans, corn, and Monterey cheddar — really does offer a cohesive Southwest palate. The chicken had a kick to it, too, much more than the Cajun filet salad from Bojangles. If you like spice, this is the fast food salad for you. That said, the chicken does cross the line into "too salty." The spice makes up for it a bit, but this quibble does hold the Spicy Southwest Salad down in third place.

Wendy's truly impressed me during this salad review. In addition to the uniqueness of the Taco Salad, there was this Cobb Salad. Full disclosure: I tried a Wendy's Cobb several months back and found it underwhelming, with stale bacon and a listless air to all its ingredients. I chose it for this review because I was eager to give it a second chance, as I love both the Cobb salad's history (it's the chop suey of the salad world, a way to reduce food waste), and Wendy's other two salads – Parmesan Caesar and Apple Pecan – didn't appeal to me and wouldn't have had a fair shake.

Whatever Wendy's did between my first experience of its Cobb and this one, the difference is night and day. Folks on Reddit are complaining about the size of the chain's new salads (though it's not clear whether they're actually smaller in terms of ounces), but I found it ample for my appetite. The mix of greens was good, though the tomatoes were a little limp and pale, and the lettuce could be crisper. The salad looked great, too, very neat, with the bacon the way I like it — not too crispy (I'm an outlier in that I like my bacon halfway as floppy as a hound dog's ears). The chicken was flavorful, too, though just a touch salty. Overall, this was a very enjoyable salad. If you want super-crisp bacon, though, it may not be your first pick.

Like its Spicy Southwestern sibling, the Chick-fil-A Cobb salad struck me as a generous, full meal from the moment I pulled it from the bag to when I took my last bite. Yes, this was the salad I insisted on finishing myself rather than enlisting the aid of others. The typical Cobb suspects were present: well-balanced quantities of hard-boiled eggs, crumbled bacon, grape tomatoes, a robust greens mix, all dotted with a hearty helping of shredded Monterey cheese. Corn made an appearance, too, offering a pleasant starchy sweetness.

The tomatoes in this salad were just as incredible as those in the Southwest salad, but it was the chicken nuggets that put this salad in first place. They were delicious, with a crisp breading, and flavorful without tasting too salty (it's right on the verge, which is actually a delectable place to land). Nuggets are one of Chick-fil-A's most ordered items, after all. If the salad had cucumbers instead of corn, it'd be perfect, but this is so jam-packed with good stuff that I don't mind.

For this review, I scoured all my local fast food menus for salads, selecting only the chains firmly on the side of "fast food." Schlotzsky's, for instance, being more fast-casual, was not included in the lineup. Although I was able to choose dressings for each item, I taste-tested all of them with my own Hidden Valley Ranch so that the dressing flavor did not impact my experience of the salad. The only exception to this was the Wendy's Taco Salad, which is meant to be eaten with chili poured over the lettuce mix. In this case, I felt that dressing would confuse my palate.

I ranked the salads on flavor, freshness, and price. If any ingredient unbalances the whole — overly salty chicken, for example — this could impact the ranking. Salad components that were clearly wilted or tasted suspiciously close to their use-by dates were another feature that could lower a salad's score. Finally, value for money counted as well. Just because a salad was cheap didn't mean it would rank higher (see Bojangles), and just because it was pricier didn't mean it would be dropped lower. But if a chain was trying to foist off a sub-par salad with an over-ambitious price tag, this would count against it.