This Chick-Fil-A Menu Item Is A Hotbed For Customer Complaints

Companies do sometimes listen to their customers' complaints and make changes. Earlier this year, Chick-fil-A undid its controversial change to the waffle fry recipe after many gripes from loyal customers. While there are still plenty of legitimate issues with Chick-fil-A that people complain about, only one menu item still gets fans of the fast food chain up in arms: the coffee. Hopefully someone in Chick-fil-A headquarters will pay attention and make a change soon.

Since Chick-fil-A has one of the best breakfast biscuit sandwiches of all the fast food chains, it's understandable that customers want to enjoy a coffee when they make a stop in the morning. The complaints specifically center on the iced coffee. "Iced Coffee = Straight to the garbage," responded one commenter on a Reddit post titled, "Does anyone actually like the ice[d] coffee?" (Few people brought up the hot coffee.) Until someone in the corporate office makes a change, you may be better served listening to the advice of one Reddit poster who wrote: "If you want good coffee[,] you should just stick to a coffee shop."

Chick-fil-A partners with Thrive Farmers, a certified B Corp focused on sharing revenue with farmers, to make its coffee. The beans are ethically sourced, but why do people dislike the iced coffee? Some people blame it on using cold brew concentrate, but diluting a concentrate is a pretty common practice that results in plenty of tasty cups. It appears to just be bad coffee. One person on Reddit wrote of the concentrate: "To me it smells and tastes kind of like soy sauce." Other descriptions for the taste people have written include "soap," "pond water," and "like a wizard turned the concept of type 2 diabetes into a drink and then added even more sugar with a slight hint of a dumpster behind an Ihop that has a 1-star on yelp." All this sounds like the concentrate used may be overextracted. Or the chain has a wizard with bad taste making the coffee.

Plenty of people do like the chain's iced coffee, but most of them have one thing in common: they add cream and sugar. The drink seems designed around pumps of sugary syrup and milk. Even then, we've found some of the specialty coffee drinks at Chick-fil-A to be undrinkable. Some posters on Reddit even order the coffee with the shake base. A poster explains what to ask for, writing "I just say 'can [I] get a vanilla (or original) iced coffee, substitute shake base instead of the milk'". Hopefully this will tide you over if you're getting breakfast at Chick-fil-A until the company finds a way to make its iced coffee less similar to soy sauce!