The Single Soda Culver's Employees Wish Customers Would Stop Asking For

Culver's might be known for its array of juicy burgers and cheese curds, but the popular Midwest chain is also known for its root beer — so much so that Culver's sells more than 315,000 gallons of it each year. What's even more impressive is that Culver's has its own root beer recipe, crafted by co-founder Craig Culver using local ingredients. As popular as root beer is at Culver's, diet root beer is the bane of many employees' existence, as they have trouble dealing with how foamy it gets. 

Root beer foams because of a combination of carbonation and stabilizing ingredients like sassafras root. Those two things create the drink's familiar foamy head but also headaches for workers. As one Redditor laments, it's often hard to pour, as "It's so frothy that I have to let it sit to get it to go down." Another poster comments that the tap at her location delivers a drink that's 99% foam. Diet root beer may be a welcome sight to thirsty customers, but it's not to employees racing to fill orders in a busy drive-thru line.

Faced with a ticking clock, some employees have said they're forced to fill the cup in increments as the foam settles gradually. The task only gets harder with each increasing cup size, while the fact that a diet root beer with no ice is a common-enough drink order to drive some employees up the wall, so much so that many of them wish customers would stop ordering it.

Self-serve soda machines have helped Culver's employees cut down on filling diet root beer orders by passing the job to the customer. But struggling to pour the cups is a uniquely frustrating experience that many employers (and customers) still must share.

To combat foam-filled cups, online commenters suggest tilting the cup at an angle and letting the soda fill the cup while the foam runs off the top and pours out. Other commenters suggest using a cup lid to scoop out the foam, topping off the cup, and repeating that process until it's full — though some have noted this method isn't necessarily efficient or sanitary.

While diet root beer isn't going anywhere anytime soon, Culver's has made headlines with another soda-related decision in July 2026, when it announced its decision to replace Mello Yellow with Cherry Coke. While some online commenters lamented the loss of the popular citrus drink, others welcomed the addition of Cherry Coke, perhaps a sign of Mello Yellow's diminishing but not entirely extinguished footprint in the soda game.