We just wanted a small fry.

We live on the Virginia coast and drive — a lot. America, Europe, Asia. We generally eat well at home, but on the road, sometimes a small fries is the easiest thing in the world. A break from the seat, a warm paper bag, a quick treat before the next leg. It's a ritual, and we've repeated it in a dozen countries.

My wife has been vegetarian most of her life. I've been vegetarian about six years, and don't eat dairy either. We both eat fish but no other meat. When we're on unfamiliar turf — a rural U.S. state we don't know, a country whose food we haven't explored — we tend to default to fries because we assume they're the one thing on a fast-food menu that's hard to get wrong. Potato, oil, salt. How tricky could it be?

Apparently, quite.

On a recent drive from the Virginia coast up to Baltimore, we wanted to grab a small fries somewhere to break up the trip. Standing in the parking lot comparing options on our phones, we started actually reading the allergen pages — something we'd never bothered to do for fries before — and were astonished at what we found. One of the largest chains in the country lists a beef-derived flavoring in its U.S. fries, alongside hydrolyzed wheat and hydrolyzed milk. Not vegetarian. Not vegan. Not gluten-free. Not dairy-free. And we'd eaten those fries dozens of times over the years, quietly assuming they were fine.

A few exits up the interstate, a different chain's fries listed three ingredients: potatoes, refined peanut oil, salt. Dedicated fryer. That was the whole thing.

The contrast was almost funny — except it wasn't, because we had clearly been eating things we'd have preferred not to for years, simply because the relevant information was buried in a PDF most people don't know exists. And when we started looking for a resource that just covered fries — fries from every chain, with clear dietary verdicts, sourced from primary documents, kept current — we couldn't find one. Plenty of allergy sites cover full menus. Plenty of vegan sites review restaurants generally. Nothing was dedicated to the specific, narrow question that matters to us and apparently to a lot of other ingredient-conscious travelers: can I eat these fries?

So here we are.

Per-diet verdicts, not one overall score

A fry can be completely vegan-safe yet cross-contaminated with gluten, or gluten-free yet not vegetarian. A single score would hide those contradictions. Instead, every chain's fries get six independent verdicts — vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free, dairy-free, kosher, halal — each marked Safe, Caution, or Not Safe with a plain-English reason.

Primary sources, always

For every chain, we start at the company's own ingredient disclosures — their allergen PDF, their nutrition page, their FAQ. We cross-check against allergen-specialist outlets (godairyfree.org, celiac-focused publications, major allergy organizations) for context, but the authoritative claim on every page is the chain's own statement. Every factual assertion on a chain page links to a source. We cite the URL, the accessed date, and what the source is being used to establish.

The FDA top-9 allergens

We track all nine major allergens recognized by the U.S. FDA: milk, eggs, wheat, soy, peanuts, tree nuts, fish, shellfish, and sesame (added in 2023 under the FASTER Act). Each chain page includes a full allergen matrix with three states: Contains (allergen present as an ingredient), Free (not present as an ingredient), and Caution (potential cross-contamination from shared equipment).

Oil, fryer, and cross-contamination

Every chain page documents the exact oil used (not just "vegetable oil" but the specific blend), whether the fryer is dedicated or shared, and what else goes into that fryer when it's shared. This matters enormously for celiac disease and severe allergies, and it's the single most under-disclosed category of information in fast-food ingredient lists.

Regional variation

We focus on North American chains, but where a chain's fry recipe meaningfully changes across borders — as it does for McDonald's, Burger King, and several others — we note the variation. The U.S. recipe is our default; international differences are called out explicitly.

Updates

Chain formulations change. Every page carries a "last verified" date. We re-audit each chain at least twice a year, and immediately whenever a reader submits a correction or a chain announces a change.

No ads, no affiliates, no sponsors

We don't run advertising. We don't take affiliate commissions. We don't have sponsored chain placements. The site exists because the information should exist. We will add a way for readers to support the project financially at some point; it will never affect which chains get covered or how they get rated.