The Highest-Quality Fast Food Chain Is This Southern Gem, According To Report

Fast food was born in the United States, and there's no doubt that Americans still love it. With dozens of chains available regionally or nationwide, consumers are often spoiled for choice, leading to strong opinions about which restaurants are the best and why. And one explosively popular southern chicken chain seems to be most people's favorite.

YouGov compiled a report on the top national fast food brands (as well as casual and specialty dining), based on its QSR CategoryView data covering survey responses from over 40,000 domestic consumers, accounting for regularity of visits, gender, and age. When it came to the overall quality of the food, Chick-fil-A reigned supreme in the fast food category.

The reasons consumers love Chick-fil-A are probably what you're familiar with. According to the report, it excels in customer service and hospitality, two business fundamentals that too often fall to the wayside in the hectic and impersonal fast food industry. It doesn't hurt that people also really like the chicken, enough for Chick-fil-A to also be America's favorite chicken chain. But not all Americans feel the same way.

There's a lot to know about this massively popular chain, but one of the things you may not know about Chick-fil-A is that one of its most profitable days ever was directly tied to anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination. On August 1, 2012, former Arkansas governor and opponent of LGBTQ+ equality Mike Huckabee organized record-breaking nationwide crowds to flood their local stores with business, to back the company's support of anti-LGBTQ+ organizations.

Chick-fil-A's history of anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination isn't quite as bad as that time when Cracker Barrel was caught explicitly discriminating against LGBTQ workers in 1991. Chick-fil-A is not known to have ever explicitly banned LGBTQ+ people from employment, and the company claims that donations to anti-LGBTQ+ organizations have ceased, though it still lacks a corporate-level anti-discrimination policy that explicitly covers LGBTQ+ people.

Unfortunately, being proudly LGBTQ+-inclusive sometimes means that business suffers. Bud Light was long the best-selling beer in America until transphobic activists organized a massive and sustained boycott because the brand gave a small number of promotional cans to a transgender influencer. Rival beer giant Molson Coors benefited from the Bud Light boycott by momentarily recording record profits in its wake — despite financially supporting LGBTQ+ causes.