Shady Things About Wendy's Frosty

The full name of the restaurant is Wendy's Famous Hamburgers, and while the perpetual runner-up in American burgers-and-fries chains serves up plenty of Baconators and Double Stacks to throngs of loyal customers, its most famous and signature menu item isn't a savory entrée. Wendy's is undoubtedly best known for its singular sweet treat, the Frosty. With a consistency somewhere in between a milkshake and melted ice cream and most effectively eaten with a spoon rather than sipped through a straw, there's nothing like the Frosty anywhere else in fast food or frozen dessert restaurants. Extremely sweet and loaded with velvety smooth chocolate, the Frosty is beloved by millions and strongly associated with the Wendy's brand.

To have attained its stature as a fast food staple and classic American dessert, there's a lot of lore and manipulation involved. The story of how the Frosty came to occupy its lofty peak is one filled with secrets, surprises, and a little nastiness. Here's the cold and not always sweet truth about Wendy's Frosty.

In 1969, Columbus, Ohio, multi-unit Kentucky Fried Chicken franchisee Dave Thomas decided to open his own restaurant, named after his daughter: Wendy's Famous Hamburgers. In the planning stage, and after taking inspiration for its square burgers from a retro fast food chain, Thomas realized that he needed a decent frozen dessert on the menu, and asked Fred Kappus if he had any ideas. Kappus ran Kappus Company, a local company that distributed restaurant appliances, including commercial soft serve ice cream machines.

Kappus had also provided the equipment for Herman Weistner, a vendor at Thistledown, a popular horse racing facility in nearby Cleveland. Weistner concocted a mix of chocolate, vanilla, and soft serve that he used with Kappus machines which he sold under the name "Secret Formula, Frosted Malted." Kappus told Thomas about the treat, a thin and flavorful approximation of a milkshake, and after he tasted it at Thistledown, he took the item on for the Wendy's menu. He adapted the product's de facto name just slightly, to "Frosty." Weistner wasn't credited — the company officially lists the Frosty's co-creators as Kappus and Thomas.

The Frosty would likely top most any ranking of the best fast food ice cream, but Wendy's is careful to never list or market the famous Frosty as being ice cream — because it doesn't fit the legal requirements, as defined by the USDA. There's simply not enough milk fat or milk solids in the Frosty base to qualify it as ice cream. A Frosty begins with soft serve, a frozen dessert that's similar to ice cream but which is technically ice milk. On its menu, Wendy's dutifully touts the Frosty as simply a "dessert — cool, creamy, and refreshing."

The race track vendor who created the Frosty's predecessor called his product in part a "Frosted Malted." Wendy's re-created the flavor exactly, including that prominent and pleasing malt taste and texture. And yet, no version of the Wendy's Frosty contains actual malted milk. It's a trick of the taste buds — because that sensation comes from vanilla. It undercuts the intense chocolate flavor in such a way that it brings out otherwise unnoticed notes in the mixture, which tastes a lot like malt.

Wendy's first major expansion was hyper-local, rapidly growing from one restaurant in Columbus, Ohio, in 1969 to six in the area. When the operation was relatively small, Wendy's could use a local dairy to provide the soft serve frozen dessert mix foundational to the Frosty. But when Wendy's became a national chain, founder Dave Thomas realized he'd have to use a commercial food service company to make the Frosty mix on a large scale, and to where the finished product would taste the same at every Wendy's restaurant. Wendy's at first contracted with Qualcon, where Tom Kullman, who'd helped Dairy Queen make an industrialized version of its soft serve mix, developed the national Frosty recipe. By trade, he was a salesman of commercial food ingredients like stabilizers, emulsifiers, and chocolate products, and he used all three to help transform the original Frosty recipe.

Today, and for the past several decades, Wendy's uses a lot of shelf-stable ingredients to make the Frosty exactly the same every time. It all comes together thanks to extremely cold soft-serve mixing machines and dispensers. The ingredient list includes such materials as powdered milk, sunflower oil-based creamer, various chemical emulsifiers and stabilizers, and chocolate powder.

The Wendy's Frosty may taste like ice cream, or evoke a nostalgic treat like what's been served at Dairy Queen for decades. Dairy Queen's soft serve isn't what you think it is, and neither is the Frosty — it's a carefully orchestrated series of food derivatives, extractions, additives, and preservatives. In other words, the Wendy's Frosty is made up almost entirely of non-whole, non-natural foods, and what are essentially chemicals and concentrations are a little gross at best, and not great for human consumption at worst.

A Frosty contains curiously vague ingredients like "flavoring" as well as carrageenan, a stabilizer and thickener that's made from red seaweed. After water, sugar, and milk in a dehydrated and powdered form, the most prominent ingredient in a Frosty is sunflower creamer. A milk substitute, it's made mostly out of sunflower oil and maltodextrin. The sunflower oil, if consumed in high amounts, can manifest as weight gain, while maltodextrin is a complex molecule, a plant-derived starch. It's added to a wide array of packaged and processed foods, and it boasts a dangerously high glycemic index. That can cause blood sugar levels to rocket, and over time, that can lead to the development of type 2 diabetes.

In an environment of fast food chains expanding around the country and offering numerous, menu-clogging variations of burgers and boneless chicken, Wendy's kept pace, growing into a chain of thousands of locations and debuting new items on a regular basis. Curiously, it took nearly four decades for Wendy's to attempt a company-wide brand extension on its signature menu item, the Frosty. The standard chocolate Frosty was part of the original Wendy's menu in 1969, but the vanilla-flavored version didn't launch until 2006, reportedly at the insistence of its customers.

And then, developments on new Frosty variants seemed to stall out. Finally, in the summers of 2022 and 2023, Wendy's temporarily ditched the vanilla in favor of strawberry, then brought in seasonal offerings like peppermint and pumpkin spice. The vanilla Frosty returned in 2024, and brief tenures followed for orange, triple berry, and pineapple-mango versions, the latter launched to commemorate the 25th TV anniversary of undersea pineapple dweller SpongeBob SquarePants alongside a Wendy's Krabby Patty collab.

There's really no other frozen dessert out there to which the Frosty can be compared, but it's such an iconic and profitable menu item for Wendy's that other food companies have certainly tried. And all, it earned one company was a lawsuit.

Since 2005, the Ohio-based United Dairy Farmers had sold via supermarkets' freezer cases and in its own chain of convenience stores two frozen, packaged treats: Frosties and Frosty Malts. Not only are those very similar products to the Frosty, but they were packaged in bright yellow and red packaging, much like the same colors Wendy's had used on its Frosty cups since 1969. In 2013, Wendy's filed a lawsuit against UDF, alleging infringement on the trademark associated with the Frosty itself as well as on the packaging with deliberate aim to make shoppers think its products were made by Wendy's. "Frosty is one of our original trademark products, dating back to 1969," Wendy's spokesperson Denny Lynch told the Columbus Dispatch. "We are taking the necessary steps to protect this iconic brand and to avoid the inevitable confusion by consumers." The parties settled the lawsuit a few months later, with UDF promising to change the name of its Frosties and Frosty Malts.

In 2024, Wendy's willingly got itself involved in the unending saga of McDonald's broken ice cream machines. It's almost common knowledge and definitely a cliché that the average McDonald's seems to always be down one of its frozen dairy dispensers. The phenomenon led to the inspiration of a broken McDonald's ice cream machine tracker called McBroken, and triggered a lawsuit involving supposedly faulty technology, corporate malfeasance, and libel. One of McDonald's biggest competitors in the fast food sector is Wendy's, and the smaller company decided to tease the industry leader and its frozen treat machine reputation with a cheeky marketing campaign.

To promote an offer where a small Frosty cost just a dollar, Wendy's shared on X, formerly known as Twitter, an image of one of its trucks bearing the slogan "Honk if you like reliable desserts." In a follow up post, Wendy's, which partnered with McBroken for the promotion, stated, "The craving for a sweet treat can strike at any time, but if fans are planning to order from the other guys they might want to avoid lunch or snack time... or really anytime between 11 a.m. and 3 p.m. When machines are most often unavailable..."