Who Makes Arby's Iconic Curly Fries?

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Few fast-food sides are more iconic than Arby's curly fries. The crisp orange spirals, seasoned to perfection and filled with fluffy white potato, are a fan favorite. The restaurant chain did not itself invent the style, but certainly did its part to popularize this fast food side dish that might be better than the main course when it introduced curly fries to its menu in 1988. Since then, these fries have been an icon of the brand, drawing customers into the restaurant and, eventually, into the freezer aisle of the grocery store. But who actually makes those famous fries? The answer depends on which Arby's curly fries you're talking about. For the best frozen French fries at the grocery store, we know exactly where they are produced. Lamb Weston in Idaho makes the branded Arby's Seasoned Curly Fries.

The restaurant version is a little harder to pin down. A 2026 video from the Massive Food Makers YouTube channel linked McCain Foods' Maine operation to Arby's curly fries. Because Arby's does not publicly identify its current restaurant potato supplier on its menu pages, however, it's safer to describe McCain as the documented producer associated with the restaurant product rather than claim that every Arby's location currently receives fries from the same plant.

Tasting Table reached out to an Arby's representative to inquire about the origin of its fries but received no response, so we are left to speculate about these spuds. The facility in Idaho may also produce curly fries for some Arby's restaurants, potentially dividing distribution regionally. Regardless of where they're produced, the fries likely get the same treatment. After the potatoes reach the facility, they are washed, peeled, sliced, blanched, dried, battered, and par-fried before being frozen and shipped off.

As for how the two styles of curly fries stack up, both are consistently customer favorites. In our ranking of 25 fast food chains' French fries, Arby's came out near the top of the list, in a very respectable third place. Switching gears to the at-home experience, bags of Arby's Seasoned Curly Fries were the number one choice in our ranking of frozen French fry brands. Obviously, there are differences between enjoying the fries at the restaurant versus in your own kitchen — namely, that in restaurants they're generally deep-fried, whereas at home they are more likely to be baked or air-fried — but both methods are clearly consistent crowd pleasers. If there's a real difference between the two, though, it doesn't seem to be big enough to keep anyone from enjoying those crisp, salty, and ever-so-slightly spicy Arby's curly fries.