11 Fast Food Ranch Sauces, Ranked

Chick-fil-A is a popular fast food chain for folks looking for a quick bite at a relatively low cost. I wanted to love Chick-fil-A's garden herb ranch sauce because I love a lot of its products and because the brand puts a seemingly exciting twist on classic ranch. Its garden herb ranch sauce is more than just a ranch sauce; it's meant to elevate the traditional ranch dressing and present a more homey version. But in reality, it just falls flat.

Chick-fil-A's ranch is a very tangy sauce with a dry aftertaste. Tangy isn't always bad when it comes to ranch, but in this sauce, tangy borders sour — and sour borders rotten a little too closely. The garden herb ranch tastes like it is not meant to be eaten, and any herb flavor fails to come through. There's the saying that a little goes a long way, and that's true here — but not in a good way. If you're the kind of person who dips your fries in the sauce just to get a little extra flavor, we can assure you that the sourness will overshadow the ranch profile. If you're a dunker, though, and you like a little bit more sauce on your fry, that might be to your benefit, as the ranch flavor is heightened when you eat more of the sauce at once.

Burger King is a fast food staple in the U.S. It's a tried-and-true, relied-upon company that you can always count on for a last-minute meal. Its ranch sauce is just as classic as its Chicken Fries or Whopper — but it just slightly misses the mark.

When you open the ranch packaging, you can see the spices sprinkled into the cream-colored sauce. The specks almost look like peppercorns, but according to the ingredient list, it's more likely to be dried parsley. Seeing the spices raised my expectations for a flavorful sauce, but this ranch didn't deliver. The slightly tart flavor dies down quickly despite the consistency being thick enough that a dollop of ranch sticks to the fry when you dip into it. The scent of the ranch isn't pungent either, which contributes to the lackluster taste. I appreciate the consistency, though, as it sits in the perfect middle ground between runny and thick. Middle ground is also a way to describe how this ranch straddles the line of not being great — but also not being the worst on our list. 

Something that sets Dairy Queen (DQ) apart is that the company makes its Hidden Valley Ranch in-house. Hidden Valley Ranch is a popular ranch dressing brand that, when compiled with whatever makes this dressing "homemade," makes me hopeful that this ranch would be one of the best.

The homemade quality is obvious as soon as you open the container. It's a black sauce cup with a clear top, which gives no indication that the sauce was prepackaged and shipped from a warehouse. When you remove the plastic top, the pungent smell of DQ ranch fills the room — which did not happen with other brands. It smells exactly like a dressing would: very strong with almost a hint of vinegar.

The smell matched the taste, which was flavorful — likely aided by the specks of spices you can see in this thick, white sauce. It was also refreshing, as you expect dressing to be. Nothing about the taste of this sauce says ranch to me, though. Rather, it just tastes like a creamy dressing seasoned with spices and lemon and does not explicitly match the flavor profile of ranch.

Shake Shack sets itself apart from many other fast food chains because of its crinkle-cut fries. When it comes to pairing with sauces, crinkle-cut fries make for good dipping — but Shake Shack's ranch container does not. The container is a shallow, flat circle that differs from the deep, cup-like containers the other chains provide. The shallowness means you do less dipping and more dragging your fry across the base of the container to get some sauce on it.

The container was also served cold as if it had been kept in the fridge, which is different from how the other ranches thus far were stored. This chill is welcomed, and it helps to offset the slight spiciness that exists in this sauce — probably because of the red specks of spices you can see when you open this container. The spice isn't overpowering, though; it strikes a balance between a sour acidity (likely from the lemon juice) and a calming sweetness.

Since this sauce still has a lot going on, from sweetness to acidity to tartness, you'd expect that once you combine the sauce with the saltiness of the fries, it will be a little overwhelming on your palate. Instead, after eating the fries and dipping them many times, I found that the ranch sauce became monotonous and unexciting the further into the meal I got.

Here is another sauce with a little extra buttermilk flavor that creates a creamy, yogurt-like taste. If these fast food chains could lose points for presentation, Popeyes would, as it presented its fries and ranch sauce in a greasy bag that didn't add any excitement to this taste test. The ranch, for which the company charges $0.29, leans toward the consistency and acidity of sour cream, but it is well-seasoned and, most importantly, well-balanced.

There's a clear mix of spicy and sweet, which I think comes from the garlic and onion powder in the recipe. Other ranches include garlic and onion powder too, but this is the first sauce that gets the ratio just right. Plus, the dried parsley adds to the balance of this recipe. I also thought the buttermilk works as an asset in this ranch sauce, which makes it clear why Popeyes keeps it in the sauce's name. Popeyes's ranch simply tastes good, which earned it a high spot in our ranking. 

Taco Bell was the underdog of this list, as it isn't nearly as popular as other chains. But the underdog always makes a comeback, as did Taco Bell in this ranch-off. Taco Bell offers spicy ranch sauce for $0.70. It's not the same as a regular ranch, but once you try Taco Bell's spicy version, you won't need any other ranch sauce.

The sauce is cream-colored and has specks of red and orange in it, which foreshadows a spicy kick. When you taste the sauce on its own, you can definitely feel a prickle in the back of your throat. It should be noted that Taco Bell doesn't sell french fries, so I tried its ranch alongside the cheesy fiesta potatoes, which also have cheese and sour cream on top. The actual ranch flavor in this sauce isn't as palpable as the spice is, but that isn't a bad thing; it actually makes for a flavorful sauce that is balanced out by the sour cream on the potatoes.

The sour cream doesn't drown out the spice, though, so it's clear that this sauce lives up to its name. That is not to say that the spice level is unmanageable, either — this sauce just makes sure that you won't forget about it when you're done with your meal.