The Best Fast Food Lemonade Comes From America's Favorite Chicken Chain

There's an indisputable hierarchy when it comes to pairing the right beverage with your specific meal. Some foods call for a crisp, cool soda, some call for a thick, creamy milkshake, and others require a light, refreshing lemonade to wash it all down. To make your time in the fast food drive-thru line even easier, we tried and ranked 10 fast food lemonades to beat the summer heat and determined that, rather unsurprisingly, America's favorite chicken chain, Chick-fil-A, offers the very best.

When the sticky styrofoam of a Chick-fil-A lemonade reaches your hands, you're in for a full-body experience. We found that every sip sent our tastebuds into orbit, always tangy but never overwhelmingly tart. There's obviously sugar in this lemonade, but again, not in an overbearing way. It all blends in perfect harmony, from the nugget ice to the slightly pulpy lemon juice. It's all the things you want from a lemonade: Simple and refreshing while still providing the dopamine rush that makes it feel like you're indulging in a sweet treat.

While the first Chick-fil-A opened in 1946, the chain didn't introduce its now-classic lemonade until 1977, right around the time when word began to spread about this chicken-focused fast food chain. Despite the complexity of flavor, Chick-fil-A's lemonade only has three ingredients (not including ice): Sunkist lemon juice, water, and sugar. For years now, Chick-fil-A employees have juiced the lemons by hand for lemonade, but according to McGraw-Hill, the brand now relies on robots to process the 1.6 million pounds of lemons turned into lemon juice per day, which are then packaged and sent to restaurants for use. Even with robots, Chick-fil-A prides itself on using actual lemon juice, not lemon concentrate, by making the batches of lemonade fresh daily in-house, much like Chick-fil-A's scratch-made biscuits.

Other than simple lemonade, Chick-fil-A is known for its beloved Frosted Lemonade, which involves a combination of lemonade and signature ice cream (though any Chick-fil-A soda can become a frosted beverage with this secret hack). The limited-time Watermelon Mint Lemonade took the internet by storm when it was introduced in 2017, and though it's not available year-round, there are still options for strawberry syrup and peach syrup. Not to mention the spin on the Arnold Palmer called the "Sunjoy" or the option for a plain diet lemonade with Splenda sweetener instead of cane sugar.