The 7-Eleven Ready-To-Eat Hot Food You Should Skip

The lure of service station food is real. The ability to fill your car's tank and your own tummy in one stop is appealingly convenient, and brands like 7-Eleven are cashing in. To help our readers pick out the best fast fare from the convenience store chain, Food Republic tried and ranked all the comestibles under 7-Eleven's heat lamps.

Let's be real — no food that's been sitting under a gas station's mechanical warmer is going to win any awards. Even so, some of the contenders are definitely better than others, and the one that came in dead last was the brand's Ultimate Pepperoni Pizza. One of the best budget pizza chains 7-Eleven is not. Our taste tester found its sauce to be bland, the cheese processed, and the pepperoni too greasy, earning it the bottom ranking below other tastier 7-Eleven snacks like the Classic Philly Cheesesteak and Big Bite Hot Dog.

A glance at the pie's ingredient list shows why it sunk to the bottom ranking. For starters, it's an incredibly (almost inedibly) salty snack, which Reddit posters have also complained about. The hot-and-ready version contains 850 milligrams of sodium per slice, while the take-and-bake pie may have even more — some have reported up to 920 milligrams (though the website currently lists it at 850). This puts an eater well over the FDA's maximum recommended daily sodium intake (which is less than 2,300 mg per day) were they to consume three or more slices. You might expect that level of salt in a fast food pizza with hot dog crust, but certainly not in a single slice of standard pepperoni.

The Ultimate Pepperoni Pizza's ingredient list isn't easy to parse, but it seems to indicate the pizza's sauce is nothing more than unseasoned tomato paste. This fits with our taste tester's impression that it was bland with little to no discernible flavor. Reddit users also report the sauce falling flat.

Our reviewer additionally found the pepperoni varieties to be underwhelmingly one-note, especially considering 7-Eleven touts the pie as having three distinct types. Our writer could only discern two variations of the meat product, with barely any difference between them. Interestingly, though the product description does, indeed, say there are three separate pepperoni varieties, the ingredient list only cites two, and their components are almost identical. The main difference is one features pork and beef while the other includes pork, beef, and chicken, which certainly explains the sameness our taster encountered.

It also seems to depend on the location or time of purchase how tasty your pizza is. Some on Reddit have claimed that the pizza they received was greasy and so overcooked as to be inedible. "It was like a burnt grease smell and taste," one reviewer complained, stating they had to throw the whole pie away. Another poster claimed their 7-Eleven pizza "tasted gross like I was eating a slice of grease on the most stale bread I've ever tasted. ... Honestly ... the worst pizza I've ever tried in my life[,] and I feel robbed of 9 dollars."