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Lost in the Sauce
Peruse the sauce aisle in any grocery store these days, and you’ll notice the familiar, generic bottles (barbecue, mustard, sad gray relish) displaced by a cavalcade of restaurant-brand fast-food sauces throwing their weight around the shelves. Whether it’s offerings from Arby’s, Taco Bell, Whataburger, Subway, or Chick-fil-A, or the sauces Popeyes released back in March to the delight of Mardi Gras mustard fans everywhere, that condiment you once timidly asked for more of at the drive-thru window is now available by the liter (no, I’m not sure how many packets that takes).
Indeed, your refrigerator door may be beginning to look like a food court, awash in more chain-sauce options than foods to dip in it. You could, if you wanted, marinate that homemade chicken breast in some Popeyes Sweet Heat, or use it to scoop up a dollop of Chick-fil-A Polynesian sauce, or wrap it in a tortilla and douse everything with Taco Bell’s Verde Salsa. Instead of plunging your nuggets into the deepest crevice of a shallow packet to eke out a single sauce molecule, you now have the luxury of ending up with a pool of the stuff on your plate, just waiting to be washed down the drain. Is this some form of ironic punishment in which we’re getting too much of a good thing? Aren’t our beloved sauces—which once drew their allure and mystique from scarcity—at risk of losing their appeal, like a cool food truck going brick-and-mortar?
Before you shrug and write off the great sauce flood as late-capitalist decadence, please recall with me the dark days of rationing. For decades, fast-food sauces were a rare ore available only in small doses no bigger than a Nyquil cup. We complained about never having enough, built up the courage to skip the line and ask for more like a child in a Dickens novel, and watched helplessly as the clerk sighed and took pity on us, bequeathing a couple of sachets into our shaking hands. In the drive-thru, you could always end up with no sauce, the wrong sauce, or an almost insulting amount, like one packet of zesty Buffalo for 27 chicken tenders. Sometimes, though it’s the stuff of legend, a customer recognizes the lack after departing the drive-thru, and boldly careers back around to the window like a maniac, demanding their fair share.
Customers long tried to subvert this scarcity with scheming. At restaurants, we grabbed whatever extra packets we could to save for the next potential skimping, and even fantasized about slipping behind the counter for a sauce heist, never to go dry again. The internet is also rife with homemade copycat recipes attempting to crack the fast-food-sauce Enigma code, but they are never quite right, likely because the ingredients mere mortals can access are too pure of mysterious stabilizers, arcane flavor boosters, and probably added fluoride.
Indeed, your refrigerator door may be beginning to look like a food court, awash in more chain-sauce options than foods to dip in it. You could, if you wanted, marinate that homemade chicken breast in some Popeyes Sweet Heat, or use it to scoop up a dollop of Chick-fil-A Polynesian sauce, or wrap it in a tortilla and douse everything with Taco Bell’s Verde Salsa. Instead of plunging your nuggets into the deepest crevice of a shallow packet to eke out a single sauce molecule, you now have the luxury of ending up with a pool of the stuff on your plate, just waiting to be washed down the drain. Is this some form of ironic punishment in which we’re getting too much of a good thing? Aren’t our beloved sauces—which once drew their allure and mystique from scarcity—at risk of losing their appeal, like a cool food truck going brick-and-mortar?
Before you shrug and write off the great sauce flood as late-capitalist decadence, please recall with me the dark days of rationing. For decades, fast-food sauces were a rare ore available only in small doses no bigger than a Nyquil cup. We complained about never having enough, built up the courage to skip the line and ask for more like a child in a Dickens novel, and watched helplessly as the clerk sighed and took pity on us, bequeathing a couple of sachets into our shaking hands. In the drive-thru, you could always end up with no sauce, the wrong sauce, or an almost insulting amount, like one packet of zesty Buffalo for 27 chicken tenders. Sometimes, though it’s the stuff of legend, a customer recognizes the lack after departing the drive-thru, and boldly careers back around to the window like a maniac, demanding their fair share.
Customers long tried to subvert this scarcity with scheming. At restaurants, we grabbed whatever extra packets we could to save for the next potential skimping, and even fantasized about slipping behind the counter for a sauce heist, never to go dry again. The internet is also rife with homemade copycat recipes attempting to crack the fast-food-sauce Enigma code, but they are never quite right, likely because the ingredients mere mortals can access are too pure of mysterious stabilizers, arcane flavor boosters, and probably added fluoride.
https://slate.com/life/2025/05/popeyes-taco-bell-chick-fil-a-sauces-where-to-buy.html