7 Chain Restaurants That Serve Fresh Biscuits And 7 That Start From Frozen

Of all the flaky, buttery breakfast sandwich vehicles out there, biscuits are among those with the most taste variability. Few things are better than a warm, soft biscuit — and few things turn to cement in your mouth like a dried-out one. The best biscuits involve copious amounts of butter and salt. In a perfect situation, pastry and oven would still be waving goodbye to each other as you're taking your first bite, but that doesn't mean you have to bake your own. Many people think restaurant biscuits taste better than homemade, so go ahead and go out. Theoretically, outsourcing the production process to professionals will yield better (read: more buttery, salty, and warm) results. What you might not know about the biscuits and gravy you're about to tuck into, though, is that the dough may well have arrived at the restaurant frozen.

Obviously, this isn't the case everywhere, so which restaurants use fresh biscuits, and which start from frozen? Finding out wasn't as easy as you might think — restaurants that make fresh biscuits in-house are overjoyed to tell you, the customer, about how they knead dough and bake their goods fresh all day long. Restaurants that use frozen dough are less forthcoming about the boxes of edible hockey pucks they pull out of delivery trucks. Don't be too quick to judge preparation methods, though, because some of these frozen options are pretty tasty in our view.

This Southern chain hand-rolls and bakes its biscuits all day long. These buttermilk biscuits are impossibly fluffy, and the ideal thickness for slicing in half and absolutely slathering in butter and jam. Getting that texture from frozen dough is hard, if not impossible. Thankfully, the dedicated staff at Cracker Barrel understand the importance of a proper biscuit to cap off a country breakfast.

Honestly, given Cracker Barrel's homespun aesthetics and commitment to evoking the feeling of exploring your grandmother's attic on a Sunday after church, it would be surprising if this company used frozen dough. It claims that "'homemade' may not be an ingredient, but it's something you can taste," and we would agree with that sentiment.

Many of the places on this list make beautiful biscuits out of frozen dough, and our goal is not to get on some high horse about whose breakfast is superior to whose. It takes commitment to serve fresh biscuits all day, though, and that effort should be lauded. If a kitchen staff is going to work that hard, the least we eaters owe them is some recognition.

To bite into a Popeyes biscuit is to immediately hear the voice of your superego. There's no way that something this good should be allowed to exist as a mere side item on a fast food menu. The amount of butter and salt contained within one bite suggests that "sinfulness" is also on the ingredient list. Taste this good has to be fresh, right? Not so fast. Whether Popeyes' staff knead and hand-roll that dough or if they simply brush some thawed pucks with butter and chuck a tray in an oven is up for debate. 

Usually when internet speculation is rooted in "back in my day," you have to take it with several grains of salt. Enough grains of salt for one Popeyes biscuit, let's say. The volume of the chatter, however, keeps growing. One Reddit user claims to have worked at a restaurant named after the founder of Popeyes, saying that it used the original recipe, describing them as "the best biscuits I've ever had from a restaurant." It's a widely held belief that the biscuits the chain now serves are frozen. Then there's the deafening silence from Popeyes itself. Delicious as the pastries may be, it seems that Popeyes' biscuits are made from frozen dough.

Sure, Krispy Krunchy Chicken is a chain that lives up to the quirkily-spelled promise of its name. A lot of places can fry chicken, but this restaurant cements itself as a high-level fast food chain with sweet and salty honey butter biscuits. Before that chicken gets crispy and those biscuits get all honey-dripped, though? Neither bird nor bread dough is frozen. Both items are prepared fresh in-house — or perhaps in-store, as Krispy Krunchy Chicken spots are mostly located within convenience stores — every day.

The company's president, Jim Norberg, has called biscuits one of the things this brand was predicated on — and the company is clearly proud to advertise this fact. Its biscuits are made to be enjoyed with the namesake chicken and its mild, cajun flavor. With how much labor goes into good biscuits, it's understandable that the side item would be elevated as close to the flagship menu item as possible. At least without changing the name of the restaurant, that is.

The fine employees of Waffle House might do many things, like fastidiously refill your coffee, command a flat-top grill like a symphony conductor, or call you "baby" if you're younger than 70. One thing they won't do? Bake biscuits from scratch. Reportedly, you can buy your own bag of frozen Waffle House biscuits. We haven't tested or verified this claim ourselves — yet. Because the potential to have a personal inventory of frozen Waffle House biscuit dough feels like information no one should waste.

Waffle House is not shy about using food sourced from other brands, like how its bacon comes from Smithfield. In fact, this restaurant is proof that a friendly, cozy environment and good company can contribute to a great meal as much as high-quality ingredients or culinary expertise, and the frozen biscuits help with that at all hours. Get your best friends together, have a fun night out on the town, and head to Waffle House at 2 a.m. Alternatively, get your family up and out of bed some Saturday and head to Waffle House at 9 a.m. See if you have a good enough time to not care how the biscuits began their day.

If you're a restaurant based in Tennessee, you're going to want to make biscuits from scratch. You're also going to want to loudly and proudly advertise that fact, which Hardee's and Carl's Jr. do. Carl's Jr. started out as a Los Angeles hot dog cart in 1941, whereas Hardee's built its brand on the flaky backs of its biscuits. If corporate mergers and restaurant groups are going to be worthwhile, though, they might as well be spreading the gospel of good biscuits.

Hardee's boasts about its dedicated biscuit makers who wake up each day before sunrise to begin baking. Those heroic workers continue to crank out a fresh batch of biscuits every quarter hour. That's exactly what's required of any restaurant that wants to be in the biscuit business and have everything ready by breakfast. It's remarkable how much planning and early-hour labor goes into your breakfast sandwich.

Wendy's is cagey about how its biscuits are made, which is circumstantial evidence that they're not fresh. The chain's employees have admitted that the dough discs are thawed overnight and baked every morning. And honestly, it's understandable that this is the practice for a fast food chain. The biscuits are still brushed with butter before being tossed in the oven, and that's one of the more important steps.

The morning meal was only introduced to this restaurant in 2020 — 35 years after 1985, which saw Wendy's first failed attempt at breakfast. A central issue with the 1985 breakfast failing was that Wendy's tried to cook omelets to order. As anyone who's lived in a college dorm or been on a cruise ship can attest, omelets cooked to order are far more of a clock eater than the average drive-thru wait. If the lingering institutional memory of trying too hard with fresh ingredients is what's keeping Wendy's from scratching out house-made biscuits, it's understandable. But that won't stop us from indulging in the occasional Honey Butter Chicken Biscuit.

When you roll up to Church's Chicken looking for a two-piece spicy combo, you're probably already thinking about how the honey butter biscuit will ease the spice from the chicken dancing on your tongue. At some point during this delicious tango, if you find yourself wondering whether Church's Chicken is on this list for fresh or frigid reasons, rest easy: Church's makes its biscuits fresh all day. Honey, butter, and hand-made are three of the most critical components of a perfect biscuit.

Talk to enough Southerners, and you'll find more than a few who think of biscuits in near-religious terms. Perhaps that's why Church's Chicken treats the pastry with healthy respect, or maybe even reverence. Does this chain believe it would be a sin to use frozen dough? They don't exactly say so, at least that we could find, but it's fun to imagine. Or maybe it's just the mood-boosting properties contained in fresh biscuits that are making us wax poetic.

Biscuits arrive at each KFC frozen, while the restaurant boasts about the effort that goes into hand-making, battering, and seasoning its food. Well, if the chicken's being made the hard way, that means there's no time left over for all the kneading, rolling, and shaping that goes into making biscuits from scratch. That's a fair trade-off.

Besides, KFC's tall, fluffy bread discs totally deliver when it comes to taste. Crispy on the outside, pillowy on the inside, buttery the whole way through. In our ranking of every KFC side dish, biscuits came in strong with a second-place finish. They're good on their own, and they're the perfect size for slicing open and jamming a chicken tender in the middle for an impromptu chicken biscuit. Dip it in honey if you want to live the good life.

Each of this Georgia-based chain's restaurants bakes biscuits fresh in-house, so while Chick-fil-A may be surrounded by controversy, it has biscuit practices everyone can agree on. The dough is rolled every half hour, all day long, and the tangy marvel that is buttermilk is added judiciously. Slice the end product in half and stick a piece of fried chicken in there? Good morning indeed.

In our ranking of the best and worst breakfast biscuits at fast food chains, we advised readers to steer clear of the sausage, egg, and cheese biscuit and opt for the spicy chicken biscuit instead. Part of this stems from the fact that Chick-fil-A is a chicken joint, not a sausage spot. Basic as it might sound, sometimes the tastiest option is what you know the restaurant does best; biscuits are a Southern food, and Chick-fil-A is a Southern chain. As a customer, you'd be right to expect these biscuits to knock your socks off. That's why every half hour, it's time to break out that rolling pin.

Burger King's buns are brought in fresh daily from a local bakery — a fact it takes care to mention prominently. Burger King wants you to know about the fresh bread. It's more tight-lipped when it comes to biscuits. Former employees have spilled the beans that, at least in the 2000s, almost every menu item was frozen, including the biscuits. In our ranking of every Burger King breakfast item, the biscuit options were pretty low on the list, which would suggest the flaky pastries are an afterthought after the croissant sandwiches.

From there, we do have to veer into the territory of more circumstantial evidence. There's the fact that Burger King is a more lunch- and dinner-focused establishment, so breakfast is only a small part of the King's court. Then, there is a lot of chatter from the company about premium ingredients and made-to-order food. For all the talk about fresh tomatoes and freshly sliced iceberg lettuce to go with the 100% all-beef patties, Burger King's website gives nothing but crickets when it comes to biscuit preparation. In all likelihood, Burger King hasn't gone out and hired a bunch of biscuit dough rollers or installed biscuit-dedicated ovens.

Another Southern-based chicken chain means another chain that takes some pride in their flaky pastries. Yes, Bojangles bakes their biscuits fresh. In fact, Bojangles has a 49-step process to make the perfect biscuit. The chain also promises to have fresh biscuits available every 20 minutes.

The company estimates that its average baker makes 1,000 pastries per eight-hour shift, and they work throughout breakfast time. That's a laudable dedication to craft. The many steps in the baking process are remarkably detail-oriented, including cutting shortening into precisely-sized cubes. Some bakers even talk about making minor adjustments to techniques depending on environmental factors like humidity.

Here we have another lunch- and dinner-focused establishment. It's right there in the name. Whataburger — which is what founder Harmon Dobson hoped customers would exclaim after one bite of the restaurant's massive burgers — is not meant to be a morning rallying cry. The biscuits here are not the star of the show. So it's no surprise that, according to the restaurant's employees, the biscuits arrive frozen and are reheated every morning.

While Whataburger's Breakfast On A Bun items might be more of a novelty, the biscuits have some devotees. The Jalapeño Cheddar Biscuit is a fan favorite, and gets people excited whenever it returns to the menu. As an added bonus, most Whataburger locations serve breakfast from 11 p.m. until 11 a.m. every day, so if you start or end work at odd hours, Whataburger will have a biscuit waiting for you. We could easily argue that those hours are exactly when you need the comfort of a biscuit.

Rest easy, Cheddar Bay dwellers: These biscuits are freshly made in-house. While this list is proof that starting from frozen can yield delicious biscuits, there's no denying that freshness brings its own quality to the eating experience. Part of that quality involves a certain romanticization of the baking process, imagining the care that was put into kneading the dough and shaping the pastries. Frozen food, fairly or unfairly, does not evoke the same labor of love-style images in our brains.

The Cheddar Bay Biscuit is a legendary menu item with a cult following. Red Lobster sells the mix at grocery stores, and the internet is filled with copycat recipes. Learning that the actual Cheddar Bay Biscuits that dot actual Red Lobster tables were not handcrafted would be like learning that Santa Claus broke up the elves' union and the North Pole got sold to a private equity firm. You wouldn't stop celebrating Christmas, but the magic would be lessened. Luckily for us biscuit lovers, who get sentimental at the thought of someone lovingly shredding just the right amount of cheddar into the flour, Red Lobster always makes theirs fresh.

This one comes with a caveat: Only some branches of McDonald's make biscuits from scratch. The Golden Arches became the most recognizable fast food name in the world by prioritizing efficiency, and that often means using frozen biscuit dough. This has never been a restaurant that was gunning for a Michelin star. Instead, the goal is simply to make sure people can reliably pick up meals almost anywhere across the globe.

Individual restaurants, however, have some leeway over food prep. Franchisee Linda Reid, from North Carolina, took to YouTube to explain, "Scratch-made biscuits were born in the south, and our expert biscuit makers are up every morning before sunrise taking a new pan of freshly made biscuits out of the oven every 12 minutes." She isn't the only McDonald's restaurant owner who's proud to serve fresh biscuits, either. Whether making the pastry from scratch is meeting customer demand, a point of pride, or both, it's good to see people get creative within a corporate structure. Hard work does deserve recognition, and maybe a reward — in the form of a flaky, fresh-from-the-oven biscuit.