The Worst Fast Food Chocolate Milkshake Is Sold By A Struggling Chain

Milkshakes are magical creations that simultaneously cool you on hot days, indulge your sweet tooth, and satisfy ice cream cravings. However, not all shakes are winners. In ranking fast-food chocolate milkshakes, Food Republic separated the cream of the crop from the frozen flops, and one stood out as the worst of the bunch: the chocolate milkshake from struggling fast-food chain A&W.

There are many unforgettable fast-food milkshakes, but this one was memorable for all the wrong reasons. Our taste tester found the A&W shake to be overpriced for what you get: an icy drink lacking both texture and flavor. Costing almost $6, the lackluster shake was more vanilla than chocolate and, overall, just didn't measure up or deliver that satisfying, fudgy sip one expects from a chocolate milkshake.

One issue is likely the way A&W makes its shakes. The flavoring — chocolate sauce, in the case of the chocolate milkshake — is manually added to vanilla soft-serve ice cream and the other ingredients. In other words, it seems how chocolatey your shake is or isn't depends entirely on the worker making it and how generous they are (or aren't) in doling out the sauce. This imprecision certainly causes inconsistency.

When handed their shake at the drive-thru, our tester's first impressions signaled it was going to have wimpy flavor. A messy streak of chocolate sauce on one side of the cup implied the flavoring was added rather haphazardly, and the shake's pale color — more closely resembling vanilla than chocolate — indicated a skimpy serving of the add-in.

Inferior milkshakes are just one symptom of A&W's decline in the United States. The chain has lagged far behind its competitors for a long time. While A&W is hugely popular in Canada, it has lost quite a bit of the footing it once had in the U.S. In the 1960s, A&W had around 2,400 locations. As of 2020, there were only about 570 A&W restaurants remaining in the United States.

The Canadian brand, A&W Canada, is separately owned and operated from A&W Restaurants, the U.S. entity, and has been for a long time. Fans of the brand in Canada report the experience is night-and-day different on their side of the border — the quality, taste, and variety of the food are all better, and even the namesake root beer reportedly tastes better. Based on our taste tester's milkshake experience alone, this inferiority of quality is a key reason U.S. A&Ws are lagging so far behind their northern neighbors.

The chain started a slow rebound in the U.S. after a group of franchisees purchased the United States company in 2011. U.S. restaurants began offering house-made root beer again in 2017, for instance. This was a reversal of a cost-saving change made in the early 2000s, which took the company's iconic root beer from being made fresh onsite to being mixed from bagged, premade concentrates. But, in spite of this return to better-quality root beer, and though the company began reporting consistent sales growth after the franchisee buyout, the comeback hasn't been nearly enough to put A&W's U.S. presence or popularity even remotely on par with Canada's. Until the product quality — we're looking at you, chocolate milkshake — south of Canada's border is of a better caliber, that isn't likely to change.