Chick-fil-A Employee Shared What Their Manager Does With Unsold Cookies At The End Of The Day
“We throw away over 55 cookies a day.”
Summer_Wind | Shutterstock A Chick-fil-A employee exposed in a Reddit post what management really does with their “food waste” at the end of the day.
Instead of packaging up leftover food and giving it to customers, employees, or those in need, the anonymous employee's manager throws it all away
This Chick-fil-A employee admitted their manager threw away over 50 unsold cookies at the end of their work day.
The chain restaurant, known best for its “Biblical values” and community-driven culture, clearly doesn’t exemplify its devoted mission. Rather, the company intentionally contributes to constant food waste at the hands of its store leadership.
“We throw away over 55 cookies a day,” the Reddit poster wrote, providing a picture as proof. “The manager didn’t let us take any home because they thought it might ‘encourage us to purposely make extra.’”
Trick050 | Reddit
"What's crazy is that the managers had to approve/ tell us when we put a batch in," the Chick-fil-A employee added in the comments, explaining that management had complete control over how many cookies were made. "It was on them."
The managers wouldn't even let the employees throw out the cookies out of fear they would keep some for themselves.
"The managers would make us wait so they could toss them themselves," the Redditor wrote in another comment. "They always had cameras everywhere in the kitchen except in the walk-in."
Food waste like this is fairly common.
According to research from the Food Waste Reduction Alliance, 84.3% of unused food in U.S. restaurants is thrown away, and many restaurants, particularly large fast-food chains, do the exact same thing that this former Chick-fil-A employee reported.
Part of this is due to liabilities that are intertwined with “giving out food” and which sometimes alter the seemingly ethical nature of eliminating food waste. While there are some protections, like the Bill Emerson Good Samaritan Food Donation Act, which helps to safeguard businesses that donate leftover food at the end of the day, the regulations can be relatively vague — especially if food is going home with employees, rather than to a food bank.
Commenters on Reddit shared similar stories of being forced to throw food away while on the job.
"When I worked in the Deli at Walmart, they would throw so much away. They donated some but not a lot," one user wrote. "I started sneaking stuff out to bring to this one homeless lady I helped a lot. [I] got caught once and they threatened to fire me but I kept on doing it. It's disgusting the amount of food we waste."
"Panera would do the same thing and not allow employees to take stuff," another commenter added. A third chimed in, "I work at Dominos, and messed up pizzas get thrown in the trash so that we don't intentionally mess up pizzas to eat them."
Considering the low wages in many service industries and overarching food insecurity, this trend is alarming.
According to 2023 USDA reports, nearly 50 million people are living in food insecure households, plagued by rising food prices, under-compensation at work, or inaccessibility to food resources like school lunches or food banks.
It’s this dichotomy between paycheck-to-paycheck households struggling to afford groceries and fast food chains throwing out 33 billion pounds of food annually that is so alarming.
There is evidently a surplus of food available to be eaten, but those who need it can't afford it.
Thankfully, platforms like Too Good To Go and other food waste-centered programs help to support community and families. At the end of the day, extra food is packaged up and either given away for free or sold at a fraction of the original cost — not tossed in a garbage can.
Zayda Slabbekoorn is a News & Entertainment Writer at YourTango who focuses on health & wellness, social policy, and human interest stories