The Secret Life of Five Guys Fries

Five Guys fries up 100 million pounds of potatoes each year, and it all starts with a simple slice of potato that's then soaked in water to pre-cook for a couple of minutes. This process gives the fries their signature texture, which is similar to a baked potato on the inside and crispy on the outside after being dropped into hot peanut oil. The entire production process is remarkably low-tech, with no microwaves, freezers, or timers in sight. Instead, the focus is on keeping things simple and fresh.

The Art of Burger Making

A traditional burger is a simple thing - meat, bun, toppings. But creating a new twist on this classic dish requires more than just creativity; it also takes science. Wendy's research and development team uses a combination of luck, intuition, and rigorous testing to come up with the perfect burger formula. They taste through countless variations of sauces, cheeses, and other toppings until they hit on something that works. The process is painstakingly detailed, with even the smallest tweaks being carefully considered.

The Science of Flavor Development

Wendy's chefs are not just winging it when it comes to flavor development; they're using tried-and-true techniques to create new and exciting taste combinations. For example, when developing a new sauce, they might try 25, 30, or even 40 variations before settling on the perfect formula. This process requires a deep understanding of how different ingredients interact with each other, as well as a willingness to take risks and try new things.

The Taste Panel: A Crucial Step in Burger Development

Once the research and development team has come up with a promising new burger formula, it's time to put it to the test. The Wendy's taste panel is made up of average people who are tasked with evaluating the flavor of each sample. They're placed in tiny cubicles and given crackers to munch on between bites, which helps them "cleanse their palate" before making their judgment. The results of these tests can be fascinating - sometimes a new burger formula will wow the panel, while other times it will fall flat.

The Evolution of Burger Taste

One interesting trend that's emerged in recent years is a shift away from traditional burger flavors towards more adventurous and experimental options. Gone are the days when the only choices were barbecue sauce and American cheese; today's burgers come with an array of toppings and sauces that cater to a wide range of tastes and preferences. This shift has been driven by consumer demand, as people look for new and exciting flavor experiences.

The Lab Behind the Burger: What Works and What Doesn't

While some burger formulas have been hailed as successes, others have met with limited success or even failure. In Wendy's R&D lab, it's not uncommon to see experimental burgers that never make it out of the door - everything from pepperoni to Canadian bacon has been tried at some point in the development process. The key to success is a deep understanding of what works and what doesn't, as well as a willingness to take risks and try new things.

The Role of Luck in Burger Development

Luck can play a surprisingly large role in burger development - sometimes a chance combination of ingredients will result in a flavor that's simply magical. In the case of Wendy's research team, they've found that even small tweaks to an existing formula can have a big impact on the final product. "You can only go so far with a hamburger," says one team member. "At some point, people start to say no." The art of burger development is all about finding that sweet spot where flavor and quality come together in perfect harmony.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enat mcdonald's restaurants all across america and in 117 countries around the world servers ask the same question thousands of times a day the answer for most of us mcdonald's customers love our fries in fact over 50 percent of our customers order fries with each of their meals it starts on the farm mcdonald's uses about 3.5 billion pounds of french fries a year that's global this factory alone makes about a million pounds of fries every day to make all those fries these trucks each haul 25 tons of spuds from the field to the factory once they're washed this high pressure steam machine peels off the skins that super heats the water underneath the skin of the potato and so when that high pressure is released that water then flashes off into steam and it loosens the peel off the outside of that potato workers hand cut any imperfections off the naked potatoes but it takes some serious firepower to give them that signature fry shape basically these long tubes act like potato cannons with a grid of razor-sharp knives inside they will shoot forward through a grid of knives at about 75 miles per hour and that's how we get that that classic mcdonald's french fry shoestring the newly minted shoestrings flood out onto conveyor belts and get this to make sure every single fry is perfect mcdonald's employ some seriously high technology in this next step we'll send over 70 000 pounds of raw french fry strips to the optical sorters an hour optical scanners look at each and every potato strip searching for blemishes the machine automatically snags any fry with a fault there's 132 little air jets at the end of that belt and the camera's going to tell which air jet to put a little puff air on that french fry knock it out of its flight pattern where then later it can get the defect cut out of that french fry strip but perfectly shoestring potatoes are only part of the secret to the world's most famous fries the cooking process does the rest we call it the art of processing that's where it starts these 100 foot long blanchers soak the potato strips in steaming hot water for about 15 minutes to give these fries the texture you expect when you go to mcdonald's and and open up a french fry look inside of it should have that a nice fluffy baked potato type internal texture and that's what the blancher does for us to get the addictively crispy exterior takes a two-step process this machine dries the blanched potatoes before they dive into the fryers and these fats a vegetable oil bubbling at almost 400 degrees fahrenheit the fries earn their name by both doing a quick fry here at the plant and the fry at the mcdonald's restaurant the combination of those two allows us to get that nice crisp exterior shell on that french fry that that you expect every time you bite into one of those mcdonald's french fries it's now out of the frying pan and into the freeze tunnel the short trip through drops the temperature to 10 degrees fahrenheit it prepares them for packaging allows them to be shipped all over the world this plant alone supplies fries to mcdonald's restaurants in more than 20 countries where they fry them up one more time if you lined up all the mcdonald's french fries produced worldwide on an annual basis from end to end they would actually travel from the earth to the moon and back almost 600 times at five guys regular cheese little cheese burgers and fries are the specialty of the house the grill proudly sports very few frills and makes meat patties like you do at home i love coming to a place that's got real hamburger meat that's fresh in the morning if i can find those places that's where i'll stop every time the five guys are actually five brothers who began grilling up their homemade hamburgers in virginia in the mid-1980s okay we'll start with the oldest my oldest brother jim and that'd be me matt and then we have chad and then we have ben and tyler all brothers their love for mouth-watering meat and potatoes now stretches across america this five guys restaurant in colorado springs colorado cooks up well over a thousand burgers every day getting ready for hungry hamburger fan starts early in the morning they slice veggies and form fresh ground beef into perfect patties all by hand the freshness is really what we focus on and keep in mind when we do our prep in the morning we prep for only one day then the number of people who walk in the door determines how many patties sizzle on the grill as soon as that customer walks in the door you're going to hear somebody up front yell two in the door one in the door three in the door that's the cue to put some patties on the grill they watch the outer edges of the patty to turn a grayish color then give them a flip flip that and we're gonna give it a good press and level the press keeps the burgers juicy and it's the juices that signal when it's time for another turn we can train these guys where they can look at a burger and say you know what that burger's done i'm gonna swing that right over here but this is only half the meal you can't have baseball without a bat you can't have a burger without fries sacks and potatoes surround customers in the restaurant a board shows where the spuds come from each day would you believe five guys fries up 100 million pounds of potatoes each year the fries start with a slice then soak in water they pre-cook the potatoes for a couple of minutes so that gives us that perfect fry that the inside of that is like a baked potato then when orders come in a final drop of the peanut oil crisps the outside pretty much goes from the dirt to the bag into the sink into the fryer and into your mouth and that's it i mean there's not there's very few steps their secret for freshness is to stay low tech no microwaves freezers or even timers here we want them to leave and go how do they make that burger so good this all-american meal takes just five to seven minutes to make here you are sir you have a great day and for some it takes even less time to eat the hamburger is a simple thing meat bun toppings so how do you come up with a different twist on this familiar taste is finding a new flavor luck or is it science i think the chili pepper will help give it a nice kick in the research and development lab of wendy's the answer is obvious say .25 on the black pepper food scientists and nutritionists toil away here year after year dedicated to building a better burger the technical side of product development is something that's probably a well-kept secret when i tell people what i do for a living they're saying how can that be so hard it just doesn't it doesn't make sense to me but when you go behind the scenes and you really look at what's involved for example in formulating a sauce we will go through often 25 30 40 variations on a particular sauce most restaurant chains are on a constant hunt for fresh and trendy flavors inspiration is everywhere one of the tough parts of our job is that we have to go eat at all sorts of restaurants all the time so that we stay in sync with really what taste trends are and ingredients and popular flavors okay i'm going to mix that up so we can see what it looks like once the r d team have picked a concept say a new mustard sauce or a spicy cheese topping they start perfecting that flavor in a typical day in our r d test kitchen facilities if we're creating some new hamburger formulas we might have 15 or 20 types of cheeses that we're tasting that day that we brought in from suppliers and we may have 10 20 30 sauces we'll taste spices go in and get taken out new combinations are mixed recorded and judged it is good after the food scientists think they've gotten close to the right taste it's test time welcome to taste panel this morning the experimental burgers are placed before a sensory panel not food experts but average people brought in to sample and rate the new burger there will be two samples of hamburgers and you'll be tasting the first one with this ballot the process is not taken lightly samplers are placed in tiny cubicles and instructed not to talk to each other but to concentrate on the burger it's not really isolation it's a little bit of privacy so that you have your own space to make your own decisions you aren't swayed by the person next to you whose face might go oh no i don't like onions or this is really a great burger and all of a sudden you think well then i must think it's a great burger too the panelists eat then answer a questionnaire about the flavor we may ask them how do you like the strength of the mustard flavor in this sauce or what do you think of the proportion of this ingredient and that ingredient together or is it too much cheese or two little cheese now everyone knows burgers and fries are a natural combination but why are the tasters given crackers to munch between bites a little bit like wine testing we like to cleanse your palate between samples once the panel passes judgment it's back to the lab to rework the recipe it takes us about a year to a year and a half to go through all phases of developing and researching and actually market testing a new promotional or special taste hamburger all this product testing has revealed an interesting fact america's taste in hamburgers is changing 10 years ago we were pretty cautious about we needed to be mainstream and mainstream meant barbecue sauces and you know american cheese maybe cheddar cheese but today we can go much further in terms of the types of toppings and flavor and even the spiciness that we put on our products of course some ideas never do make it out of the lab and into the market we've tried a lot of things actually that didn't work on hamburgers we've tried pepperoni canadian bacon salami we've done marinated peppers and onions but i think you could only go so far with a hamburger and then people say no no you've got too far now youat mcdonald's restaurants all across america and in 117 countries around the world servers ask the same question thousands of times a day the answer for most of us mcdonald's customers love our fries in fact over 50 percent of our customers order fries with each of their meals it starts on the farm mcdonald's uses about 3.5 billion pounds of french fries a year that's global this factory alone makes about a million pounds of fries every day to make all those fries these trucks each haul 25 tons of spuds from the field to the factory once they're washed this high pressure steam machine peels off the skins that super heats the water underneath the skin of the potato and so when that high pressure is released that water then flashes off into steam and it loosens the peel off the outside of that potato workers hand cut any imperfections off the naked potatoes but it takes some serious firepower to give them that signature fry shape basically these long tubes act like potato cannons with a grid of razor-sharp knives inside they will shoot forward through a grid of knives at about 75 miles per hour and that's how we get that that classic mcdonald's french fry shoestring the newly minted shoestrings flood out onto conveyor belts and get this to make sure every single fry is perfect mcdonald's employ some seriously high technology in this next step we'll send over 70 000 pounds of raw french fry strips to the optical sorters an hour optical scanners look at each and every potato strip searching for blemishes the machine automatically snags any fry with a fault there's 132 little air jets at the end of that belt and the camera's going to tell which air jet to put a little puff air on that french fry knock it out of its flight pattern where then later it can get the defect cut out of that french fry strip but perfectly shoestring potatoes are only part of the secret to the world's most famous fries the cooking process does the rest we call it the art of processing that's where it starts these 100 foot long blanchers soak the potato strips in steaming hot water for about 15 minutes to give these fries the texture you expect when you go to mcdonald's and and open up a french fry look inside of it should have that a nice fluffy baked potato type internal texture and that's what the blancher does for us to get the addictively crispy exterior takes a two-step process this machine dries the blanched potatoes before they dive into the fryers and these fats a vegetable oil bubbling at almost 400 degrees fahrenheit the fries earn their name by both doing a quick fry here at the plant and the fry at the mcdonald's restaurant the combination of those two allows us to get that nice crisp exterior shell on that french fry that that you expect every time you bite into one of those mcdonald's french fries it's now out of the frying pan and into the freeze tunnel the short trip through drops the temperature to 10 degrees fahrenheit it prepares them for packaging allows them to be shipped all over the world this plant alone supplies fries to mcdonald's restaurants in more than 20 countries where they fry them up one more time if you lined up all the mcdonald's french fries produced worldwide on an annual basis from end to end they would actually travel from the earth to the moon and back almost 600 times at five guys regular cheese little cheese burgers and fries are the specialty of the house the grill proudly sports very few frills and makes meat patties like you do at home i love coming to a place that's got real hamburger meat that's fresh in the morning if i can find those places that's where i'll stop every time the five guys are actually five brothers who began grilling up their homemade hamburgers in virginia in the mid-1980s okay we'll start with the oldest my oldest brother jim and that'd be me matt and then we have chad and then we have ben and tyler all brothers their love for mouth-watering meat and potatoes now stretches across america this five guys restaurant in colorado springs colorado cooks up well over a thousand burgers every day getting ready for hungry hamburger fan starts early in the morning they slice veggies and form fresh ground beef into perfect patties all by hand the freshness is really what we focus on and keep in mind when we do our prep in the morning we prep for only one day then the number of people who walk in the door determines how many patties sizzle on the grill as soon as that customer walks in the door you're going to hear somebody up front yell two in the door one in the door three in the door that's the cue to put some patties on the grill they watch the outer edges of the patty to turn a grayish color then give them a flip flip that and we're gonna give it a good press and level the press keeps the burgers juicy and it's the juices that signal when it's time for another turn we can train these guys where they can look at a burger and say you know what that burger's done i'm gonna swing that right over here but this is only half the meal you can't have baseball without a bat you can't have a burger without fries sacks and potatoes surround customers in the restaurant a board shows where the spuds come from each day would you believe five guys fries up 100 million pounds of potatoes each year the fries start with a slice then soak in water they pre-cook the potatoes for a couple of minutes so that gives us that perfect fry that the inside of that is like a baked potato then when orders come in a final drop of the peanut oil crisps the outside pretty much goes from the dirt to the bag into the sink into the fryer and into your mouth and that's it i mean there's not there's very few steps their secret for freshness is to stay low tech no microwaves freezers or even timers here we want them to leave and go how do they make that burger so good this all-american meal takes just five to seven minutes to make here you are sir you have a great day and for some it takes even less time to eat the hamburger is a simple thing meat bun toppings so how do you come up with a different twist on this familiar taste is finding a new flavor luck or is it science i think the chili pepper will help give it a nice kick in the research and development lab of wendy's the answer is obvious say .25 on the black pepper food scientists and nutritionists toil away here year after year dedicated to building a better burger the technical side of product development is something that's probably a well-kept secret when i tell people what i do for a living they're saying how can that be so hard it just doesn't it doesn't make sense to me but when you go behind the scenes and you really look at what's involved for example in formulating a sauce we will go through often 25 30 40 variations on a particular sauce most restaurant chains are on a constant hunt for fresh and trendy flavors inspiration is everywhere one of the tough parts of our job is that we have to go eat at all sorts of restaurants all the time so that we stay in sync with really what taste trends are and ingredients and popular flavors okay i'm going to mix that up so we can see what it looks like once the r d team have picked a concept say a new mustard sauce or a spicy cheese topping they start perfecting that flavor in a typical day in our r d test kitchen facilities if we're creating some new hamburger formulas we might have 15 or 20 types of cheeses that we're tasting that day that we brought in from suppliers and we may have 10 20 30 sauces we'll taste spices go in and get taken out new combinations are mixed recorded and judged it is good after the food scientists think they've gotten close to the right taste it's test time welcome to taste panel this morning the experimental burgers are placed before a sensory panel not food experts but average people brought in to sample and rate the new burger there will be two samples of hamburgers and you'll be tasting the first one with this ballot the process is not taken lightly samplers are placed in tiny cubicles and instructed not to talk to each other but to concentrate on the burger it's not really isolation it's a little bit of privacy so that you have your own space to make your own decisions you aren't swayed by the person next to you whose face might go oh no i don't like onions or this is really a great burger and all of a sudden you think well then i must think it's a great burger too the panelists eat then answer a questionnaire about the flavor we may ask them how do you like the strength of the mustard flavor in this sauce or what do you think of the proportion of this ingredient and that ingredient together or is it too much cheese or two little cheese now everyone knows burgers and fries are a natural combination but why are the tasters given crackers to munch between bites a little bit like wine testing we like to cleanse your palate between samples once the panel passes judgment it's back to the lab to rework the recipe it takes us about a year to a year and a half to go through all phases of developing and researching and actually market testing a new promotional or special taste hamburger all this product testing has revealed an interesting fact america's taste in hamburgers is changing 10 years ago we were pretty cautious about we needed to be mainstream and mainstream meant barbecue sauces and you know american cheese maybe cheddar cheese but today we can go much further in terms of the types of toppings and flavor and even the spiciness that we put on our products of course some ideas never do make it out of the lab and into the market we've tried a lot of things actually that didn't work on hamburgers we've tried pepperoni canadian bacon salami we've done marinated peppers and onions but i think you could only go so far with a hamburger and then people say no no you've got too far now you\n"