We tasted 20 top NC fast-food sweet teas. Here are the rankings
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Reporters iced the teas at Dorthea Dix park.
- Waffle House's tea was described as fresh and light.
- Arby’s placed last because it served unsweet tea that tasted tannic and bitter.
Sweet tea is the nectar of the South, an icy glass of sunshine and sugar.
You’ll find this suppertime staple on many kitchen tables every night in the Triangle.
Beloved as barbecue, sweet tea is at every picnic and tailgate, in countless cupholders and in the hearts of many who started sipping on it since childhood.
Because of how it’s made, even fast food sweet tea is special. In almost every case, sweet tea is brewed fresh, sweetened while hot and then cooled down, the ice hissing and popping in the cup.
There are some iconic sweet teas and some serious sleepers.
We needed to know who brews the best sweet tea in the Triangle, so we gathered 20 fast food favorites for the ultimate Sweet Tea Showdown.
How we did it
A team of reporters went out and gathered 20 different fast food sweet teas, without ice. We then met up at a picnic shelter at Dorothea Dix park and iced the teas. Reporters Drew Jackson and Twumasi Duah-Mensah, each sweet tea devotees, tasted and ranked all the teas.
Note: Due to a styrofoam incident, one sweet tea (Cook Out) was lost during the initial tasting. Drew made a pit stop a few days later to sample on his own.
Here are the results.
Drew’s Take
Setting aside water, which they say is essential to survival, there’s no liquid on earth I’ve drank more of than sweet tea. We brewed it every night for dinner. Sweet tea was simply a fact of life.
I assumed that I’ve safely consumed a swimming pool’s worth of sweet tea in my lifetime, but in fact checking this I found it would actually take 109 years to drink that much sweet tea.
So, not that much. But a lot. Probably somewhere between 17 bathtubs and a small tanker truck.
A beautiful thing about sweet tea is it’s always a little different. I’ve had sweet tea from most of the fast food joints on our list, sometimes good, sometimes bad, sometimes fresh, sometimes old, sometimes bitter, sometimes so sweet your toes curl.
The word for the subtleties flavoring the edges of good, and great sweet tea is love.
This is why fast food tea is important. It’s made the same way at McDonald’s as it is at a fine dining restaurant. There’s no other way to make good tea other than brewing it, adding sugar while it’s hot and then chilling it over ice. It’s made by human hands and consumed by our hearts.
Drew’s ranking
- Waffle House
- Cook Out
- Hardee’s
- Whataburger
- KFC
- Wendy’s
- Chipotle
- Zaxby’s
- Freddy’s
- Sonic
- Chick-fil-A
- Taco Bell
- McDonald’s
- Bojangles
- Popeye’s
- Smithfield’s
- Raising Cane’s
- Burger King
- Culver’s
- Arby’s
The good
Waffle House, I was unfamiliar with your game. The 24-hour diner is a bit of an outlier in our list, but the tea touches on everything I’m looking for. Its sweetness is balanced by a rich brew, but the flavor is a sunny kind of brightness, drinking fresh and light.
Hardee’s was balanced, leaning towards sweet but complex and refreshing. This is suppertime tea from a drive thru.
Cook Out was very sweet but deeply flavorful, making North Carolina proud.
Whataburger has gotten a lot of press since moving into the Triangle, but props to this Texan newcomer. The tea is as fresh as they come, subtly sweet with a depth that lingers.
The surprises
Expectations were high for the legends of sweet tea, perhaps unfairly so. I’ve loved each of these for many years but Bojangles, Popeyes, Chick-fil-A and McDonald’s struggled in our taste test. Each was out of balance, weak and carrying off flavors. Maybe it was an off day for the icons.
The bad
Arby’s is dead last on a technicality. They served us unsweet tea. There isn’t anything wrong with unsweet tea, many people love and prefer it. But in a sweet tea taste test not only is unsweet tea going to suffer, it’s going to be exceptionally tannic and bitter.
As far as actual flavor, Culver’s was probably the weirdest one, with a sweetness nodding towards bubble gum. Bubble gum tea? Sounds like a horror movie villain.
Twumasi’s Take
I entered Thursday’s taste test with no favorite. Reverence for the greats of the game? Sure. But I believed the differences in rank between 19 sweet teas would be so marginal to render the entire exercise arbitrary. All sweet tea is good sweet tea, I thought.
Now, as I reflect on how many tea stains my dentist will scrape off, I’ve come to appreciate the competition a taste test created — and its necessity. A Bojangles sweet tea may be perfect for washing down a three-piece combo and biscuit. But on a windy day at Dorothea Dix Park, does it prove to be more than sentimental?
And while my taste buds could sense the intentions of familiar formulae, on game day, your sweet tea is only as good as the hands that brew it. And my job as a journalist is not to salvage preconceived hagiographies of the greats when they fall short — it is only to reflect the record as it is.
Twumasi’s ranking
With that in mind, let the record reflect the following rankings:
- Hardee’s
- Whataburger
- Zaxby’s
- Wendy’s
- KFC
- Waffle House
- Chipotle
- Freddy’s
- Taco Bell
- Sonic
- Smithfield’s
- Popeyes
- Culver’s
- Bojangles
- McDonald’s
- Raising Cane’s
- Chick-fil-A
- Arby’s
- Burger King
Analysis: Flavor beats sugar when sugar fails to flavor
As you cycle through sweet tea after sweet tea and try to justify to yourself why you drank so much caffeine to make yourself shiver in 70-degree weather, you come to appreciate the journey every tea takes you on.
A subtle, refreshing exposition. Waves of sugar with the right jolts and simmers. A firm yet calm closing argument for the taste buds to ponder. I knew teas oversaturated with sugar would not seize the day going into this, but I have a greater appreciation now for chains whose symphonic brews leave more to adore beyond the fawning saccharine.
These revelations opened the door for blacker teas that let the flavor do the talking and the sugar hit the high notes. My top five chains fit that description, though there was still room in my heart for lighter, brighter teas like Waffle House whose sparkles of sugar shredded riffs your taste buds could dance to.
Other chains — even ones my subconscious marked as favorites heading in — and their contrived brews sent flavor to the back and chose instead to headline sugars so artificial it could feel like tasting bubblegum tea. Ew.
That tells the story of the bottom eight, with particular ignominy reserved for teas that either didn’t taste sweet — gameday jitters, I assume — or “how do you mess this up?” kind of flavor. (Burger King. Really, just Burger King.)
This story was originally published May 19, 2026 at 7:00 AM.
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