Wendy’s Frosty – Hey! What’s in Your Drink?

Wendy’s Frosty – Hey! What’s in Your Drink?

What I am about to write is not going to make me stop consuming my Oreo Cookie Twisted Frosty, but it might just give reason to others to give up what might be their favorite fast-food restaurant treat.

Most of the time, when you purchase a milkshake, you get soft-serve ice cream which has been whipped or mixed with milk into a more drinkable state.  There are those rare occasions in which you do get hand scooped ice cream which is blended with milk to form a consistency to be consumed through a straw.

When Wendy’s first introduced their “Frosty” in competition with other restaurant’s milkshakes, they touted the fact that it was so thick that it had to be eaten with a spoon.  Right off the bat, that deleted it form the ranks of a milkshake.

Since the company introduced the “Frosty” it has evolved from a simple choice of chocolate or vanilla soft serve ice cream to what resembles the Dairy Queen’s Blizzard.  Their “Twisted Frosty” has a list of ingredients that can be mixed with the ice cream to give it a new enticement for customers to purchase.  By the way, it works.  I like my Oreo Cookie Frosty.

Wendy’s Frosty requires 14 ingredients to create what traditional shakes achieve with only milk and ice cream. So what is in the ingredient list? – thickening agents that includes guar gum, cellulose gum, and carrageenan.   Granted many ice creams have those same ingredients.

But take those and add them to the other chemical smörgåsbord of ingredients, the “Frosty” is not only NOT a milkshake, but it is MORE than just soft serve ice cream.

For instance, check out the Coffee Toffee Twisted Frosty.  It seems harmless enough; the only additions, after all, are “coffee syrup” and “coffee toffee pieces.” The problem is that those two additions contain 25 extra ingredients, seven of which are sugars and three of which are oils.

Rather than a classic syrup, the “coffee syrup” would more accurately be described as a blend of water, high-fructose corn syrup, and propylene glycol.  By the way propylene glycol is a chemical that’s used as an emulsifier in food, and it has a laxative effect. (So, that’s why I have an urge to hit the john when I leave Wendy’s!”

Of all 10 ingredients it takes to make the syrup, coffee is one of the last ingredients mentioned.  It’s almost as if the manufacturer was saying, “Oh, and by the way, there’s coffee in the syrup.”

I guess it goes back to subliminal advertising, but I will continue to devour my Oreo Cookie Twisted Fosty, that is, until I get disillusioned with the ingredients that make up the cookie.  My Frosty doesn’t make me want to go to the bathroom after eating it, but it does make me want to dunk.