The MAHA fry report card.

In early 2025, Steak 'n Shake announced it was switching every US location to 100% beef tallow for its fries. The chain's communications leaned into the move hard: shoutouts to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., social media that drifted toward Tesla and Fox News imagery, and language explicitly embracing the "Make America Healthy Again" (MAHA) policy framing. In a Fox News interview with Sean Hannity, Kennedy named the chain by name: "Steak 'n Shake has been great. We're very grateful to them for RFK'ing the french fries."

It's one of the stranger moments in recent fast-food history, and it created something worth taking seriously: an informal set of criteria for what a MAHA-approved fry looks like. The movement's complaints about industrial food are specific. Seed oils (soybean, canola, corn, sunflower in some framings). Artificial dyes (Red 40, Yellow 5, Red 3, and the rest). Long ingredient lists. Unnecessary additives like dimethylpolysiloxane and TBHQ. Shared fryers that compromise the ingredient story.

If you take those complaints at face value and apply them to every fry on Frypedia, which chains actually come out ahead? And more interestingly: does the chain the movement crowned (Steak 'n Shake) actually score highest? We spent two weeks running every chain against the MAHA criteria and scoring them 0 to 10. Here's what we found.

The scoring methodology.

Four categories, two or three points each. Maximum ten.

Fry oil (0–3 points). Beef tallow or olive oil earns 3 points — these are the "traditional" fats the MAHA movement affirmatively endorses. Peanut, sunflower, and rice bran oils earn 2 points — traditional-coded enough to pass but not actively celebrated. Canola earns 1 point — borderline. Soybean, corn, and generic vegetable blends earn 0 points — the "seed oils" the movement names specifically.

Dedicated fryer (0–2 points). A fry fryer that doesn't share oil with any other menu item scores 2. A shared fryer scores 0. The MAHA complaint here isn't strictly health-based; it's about ingredient-list integrity — a dedicated fryer means the fry is actually what the fry recipe says it is.

Ingredient-list length (0–3 points). Three ingredients earns 3 points. Four earns 2. Five or six earns 1. Seven or more earns 0. The MAHA argument on this one is straightforward: a potato, oil, salt fry is "real food." McDonald's eleven-ingredient US fry is not.

Clean label (0–2 points). No synthetic additives (TBHQ, dimethylpolysiloxane, natural beef flavor, artificial colorings) scores 2. One such additive scores 1. Multiple score 0. This is the "we don't want weird chemicals" criterion in the most direct form.

We applied these to all 60 chains on Frypedia using current published ingredient disclosures and verified cooking-oil statements. The full per-chain scoring lives on the MAHA-Friendly ranking page. Here are the top-level findings.

The surprising winner: Elevation Burger (10/10).

Elevation Burger scores a perfect 10 against the MAHA criteria. Olive oil (3). Dedicated fryer (2). Three-ingredient fry (3). No synthetic additives (2). This is the only chain on Frypedia that scores a clean sweep.

Elevation Burger is a tiny chain — founded 2005, under 15 US locations, acquired by Kuwait-based Tabco International in May 2026 as part of the FAT Brands bankruptcy sale. It is not what the MAHA movement is talking about when it talks about reforming fast food. It barely registers on the national QSR map. But by every criterion the movement publicly uses, it beats every other chain. If the movement's goal is actually "fast-food fries made with real ingredients cooked in traditional fats in a dedicated fryer," Elevation Burger is already the answer.

The near-perfects: In-N-Out, Five Guys, Dick's Drive-In (9/10).

Three chains tie for second place at 9 points. All three fry in traditional-coded oils (sunflower for In-N-Out and Dick's, peanut for Five Guys), all three use dedicated fryers, all three are three-ingredient fries, and all three are additive-free. The one point they lose is on oil — sunflower and peanut aren't beef tallow, so they don't earn the full three points under the MAHA framing. But in practical terms, they're indistinguishable from Elevation Burger on the health claims the movement actually makes.

Worth noting about this group: all three were doing this before MAHA existed. In-N-Out has been hand-cutting Kennebec potatoes and frying them in sunflower oil in a dedicated fryer since 1948. Five Guys since 1986. Dick's Drive-In since 1954. None of them is positioned around health-movement language. They were just making fries the way they wanted to make them.

The crowned chain: Steak 'n Shake scores 7/10.

Here's where it gets interesting. Steak 'n Shake — the chain Kennedy named directly, the chain that reformulated specifically to meet the MAHA criteria — scores a 7. It earns the full three points for the beef tallow switch. It earns 3 points for ingredient-list length (potato, tallow, salt — three ingredients, perfectly MAHA). It earns 2 points for a clean label (no synthetic additives).

Where it loses: the fryer is shared. Steak 'n Shake fries alongside their crispy chicken sandwich coating and other breaded menu items. That's a 0 on the dedicated-fryer criterion. The chain also acknowledged, buried on its website, that some of its fries were pre-cooked in seed oils before the final tallow fry — a step most restaurant operators do at the Simplot plant level, which Steak 'n Shake has not been able to fully control. For the strictest interpretation of the MAHA criteria, Steak 'n Shake's commitment is directionally right but operationally incomplete.

The chain is still above median, obviously. A 7 is a strong score. But the perfect fry under the movement's own criteria exists — it's just not the one the movement has celebrated.

The bottom of the list: McDonald's and the other QSR giants.

At the opposite end of the ranking, the largest chains cluster around 0 to 2 points. McDonald's scores 0. Burger King scores 1. Taco Bell's Nacho Fries score 0. Wendy's manages 3, mostly on the back of a relatively short ingredient list.

McDonald's is the clearest case against the movement’s criteria. US McDonald's fries cook in a soybean-canola-corn vegetable oil blend (0 on oil). The fryer is shared with hash browns and McCrispy items in most stores (0 on dedicated fryer). The ingredient list runs to eleven items including dextrose, sodium acid pyrophosphate, and "natural beef flavor" (0 on length). The natural beef flavor is a synthetic flavoring built from hydrolyzed wheat and milk steeped in rendered beef tallow (0 on clean label). The chain scores 0 on every MAHA category.

This isn't a mystery. McDonald's has a very specific product it's trying to deliver: a fry that tastes exactly the same at eleven thousand US locations across twenty-plus suppliers, consistent across every season, cooked by every teenager who's ever worked at a McDonald's. The ingredient list reflects that engineering. The MAHA movement is objecting to the engineering itself. There's no reformulation path that keeps the current taste profile and the current consistency.

Where the criteria are contested.

We should flag this clearly: the MAHA framing is scientifically contested, particularly on the seed oil question. The best current peer-reviewed meta-analyses on dietary fats generally find that replacing saturated fat with polyunsaturated oils (soybean, canola, sunflower) is associated with better cardiovascular outcomes, not worse. The American Heart Association's position hasn't moved. The "seed oils are inflammatory" argument that the movement makes draws from mechanistic studies and functional-medicine clinicians, not from the gold-standard outcomes evidence.

What this means for the report card: a high MAHA score and a nutritionally better fry are not the same thing. Elevation Burger's olive oil fry is arguably healthier than McDonald's partly for reasons the movement cares about (short ingredient list, no additives, dedicated fryer) and partly for reasons it doesn't discuss (olive oil has a specific lipid profile that holds up well under repeated frying). Steak 'n Shake's beef tallow fry is calorically dense and saturated-fat-heavy, which has been the single most-studied dietary association with cardiovascular disease for the last fifty years — a fact that doesn't go away because the movement finds it inconvenient.

The report card measures alignment with the movement's criteria. It doesn't measure whether the criteria are correct.

The watch list for 2026 and 2027.

Three chains are specifically worth watching for score changes over the next 18 months:

In-N-Out has publicly stated it is "researching a better-quality oil for its fries." Given the chain's existing MAHA-friendly posture (sunflower oil, dedicated fryer, three-ingredient fry), the "better quality oil" question is almost certainly about moving to something that scores higher under the current discourse — most likely olive oil or tallow. Either move would push In-N-Out from 9/10 to 10/10.

Chick-fil-A faces its own version of this pressure. The canola fry is MAHA-adjacent but doesn't fully satisfy the criteria. A move to peanut, sunflower, or olive oil would improve the score. There's no public signal that this is happening — but the chain's audience overlaps significantly with the MAHA audience, and pressure is almost certainly being discussed internally.

Burger King rolled out "Crispy Fries" in Canada in April 2026, a thinner, crispier recipe that's been compared to McDonald's. The reformulation was marketed on taste rather than ingredient-list claims. But Burger King's score on the MAHA criteria is low enough that any reformulation represents an opportunity to publicly align with the movement — if the chain decides to do so. We expect the US rollout, when it comes, to be positioned at least partly on cleaner-label grounds.

The quietest point.

There's an obvious reading of this report card that goes something like: the MAHA movement’s preferred fast-food fry is beef tallow, dedicated fryer, three ingredients, no artificial additives. By that standard, the best fast-food fry in America is Elevation Burger (olive oil, which the movement accepts as a traditional fat), and the second-best is In-N-Out (sunflower). The chain Kennedy actually celebrated is in third place at best. The chains that lose on every criterion — McDonald's, Burger King — are the biggest chains in the industry.

The MAHA fry report card isn't a political document. It's a scoring exercise. But the scoring reveals something: the fries that score best are the fries at the chains that never changed. The chains at the bottom of the ranking got there by optimizing for taste consistency and supply-chain flexibility at scale — the exact things that make a fast-food chain a fast-food chain. If you want fries that score 10/10 on the movement's criteria, you can get them. You just can't get them from a drive-through at 11 PM on a Tuesday in rural Nebraska. You have to get them from one of the twelve Elevation Burger locations currently open. The scorecard is honest. The implications are not necessarily what the movement wants them to be.