Fast Food Menu Items That Disappeared During The Pandemic And Never Returned

Fast food menus are forever in flux, with new items perpetually arriving and old ones getting retired. The reasons for deletion are many, but it usually comes down to money — profit margins may be slim in a fast food restaurant. Plus, products that aren't bringing in much revenue aren't bound to last long, nor are the ones that require too much labor or steps, because that uses up resources that could otherwise be used more efficiently and profitably.

The shift in eating and purchasing habits that came with the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 were tough to navigate for fast food chains. Lockdowns and social distancing rules meant fewer or no in-store customers and busier drive-thru lanes, along with supply chain issues and worker shortages. Many of the bigger fast food companies had to respond quickly, and they made their menus smaller so as to operate in a more organized and economically conscious way. They all got rid of numerous menu items and options, and while most would eventually come back, some didn't. Here are fast food products that went away during the age of the coronavirus that never reappeared.

McDonald's started serving breakfast in the early 1970s, and until 2016, it sold Egg McMuffins, hash browns, and the like each morning until a firm cutoff time of 10:30 a.m. That all changed in 2016 with the introduction of the all-day breakfast. Four years later, near the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic and its associated lockdowns and safety measures in 2020, McDonald's decided to end the program. According to the company, the cut was made to make work easier on its kitchen crews during such fraught social and economic times. The company never gave a solid date on when all-day breakfast would return, only that the service would come back eventually.

It never did, however, and a few months after what was supposed to be a temporary cutback, McDonald's franchisees voted in favor of eliminating all-day breakfast forever. While ostensibly done to make service more efficient, McDonald's corporate chef Mike Haracz claimed that cooking breakfast foods simultaneously with lunch and dinner items made kitchens chaotic and crowded. "They realized that the training, the amount of crew that they would have needed in the restaurant to successfully do that — it was way too difficult — you needed too many people," Haracz said in a TikTok video (via Men's Journal).

One of the few McDonald's menu items served all day long, marketed as both breakfast fare and an anytime snack, the Fruit 'n Yogurt Parfait first appeared on the McDonald's menu in 1999 as a test balloon for a company-wide attempt to sell fare generally healthier than burgers and french fries. Inside of a plastic cup came layers of low-fat vanilla-flavored yogurt sandwiching blueberries and strawberry slices and topped with granola crumbles.

The Fruit 'n Yogurt Parfait remained about the healthiest thing available at McDonald's until 2020, when the chain got rid of it as part of a coronavirus-related menu contraction. COVID-19 led to smaller kitchen crews than usual, and in order to fill orders in a rapid manner, McDonald's got rid of some of its less popular menu items in the name of efficiency. By and large, that meant all of its health food products, such as the Fruit 'n Yogurt Parfait.

To make its labor-depleted kitchens operate in a quick and efficient manner, and to ensure the safety of both its customers and its crew during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic in mid-2020, McDonald's removed many products from its menus. Among the first things to go: every single salad. Easily one of the more health-conscious product lines sold at McDonald's, the salads, whether entree-sized and topped with chicken, or smaller and sold as a veggie-based side, were not bestsellers whenever the chain offered them. That led to McDonald's executives' decision to take them off the menu, allowing crews to allocate what limited resources it had to the sale and preparation of products that did move well, and at more of a profit.

McDonald's hedged its bets and tried to reassure customers that some of its coronavirus menu cutbacks could be reversed at some point, and while some items came back, salads never reemerged. As of 2025, the chain's only menu items derived from fresh produce are the not gluten-free McDonald's fries and apple slices.

Historically one of the least expensive Taco Bell offerings, or at least one that gave customers a high calories-to-dollar ratio, the Triple Layer Nachos consisted of just a couple scoops of tortilla chips topped with warm and melty refried beans, gelatinous cheese sauce, and a generous squirt of red sauce. It was a star of Taco Bell's Why Pay More!? Value Menu, which debuted in 2008, and was priced at just 89 cents. While the price would eventually change, it remained a low-key entry on the Taco Bell board for more than a decade.

When Taco Bell made broad, sweeping cuts to its vast menu in the summer of 2020 to account for various limitations brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, one of the items it immediately got rid of was the Triple Layer Nachos. "We encourage fans to snag the following menu items over the next few weeks before discovering new favorites," Taco Bell recommended in a press release warning of the Triple Layer Nachos' impending disappearance. It's for the best that any customers rushed to a contact-restricted local branch to get them, because the Triple Layer Nachos never returned to the menu, even as people are turning to Taco Bell to save money during a post-COVID period of inflation.

A few months into the COVID-19 pandemic in the summer of 2020, Taco Bell announced a necessary menu overhaul, attempting to make food prep as simple as possible in its understaffed, low-contact kitchens. "Some old favorites may be retiring," Taco Bell warned in a press release, and on the list of deletions was one of the Mexican-inspired chain's signature and most enduring menu items, the Seven-Layer Burrito. Introduced in the early 1990s, the approximation of the classic seven-layer dip took rice, beans, lettuce, tomato, cheese, sour cream, and guacamole, all encased in a large tortilla. One of the best vegetarian fast food menu items, customers could also add chicken or beef to the already big burrito.

One of the more complicated items ever available at Taco Bell, it makes sense that coronavirus cutbacks would lead to the temporary deletion of the Seven-Layer Burrito. But after operations mostly got back to normal, the item still didn't return, nor did it make an appearance when Taco Bell's Decades Menu brought back old faves in 2024.

A popular selection from its budget-priced Dollar Menu and later the Cravings Value menu, Taco Bell's Beefy Fritos Burrito was a cut-rate item made with the regular seasoned beef blend, seasoned rice, nacho cheese sauce, and Fritos. When Taco Bell made big cuts to its menu in 2020 in response to COVID-related problems, the Beef Fritos Burrito was quickly eliminated. This marked the last time that the Taco Bell menu had a permanent inclusion made with Fritos corn chips, making this burrito technically a discontinued Frito-Lay product that deserves a comeback.

It's not the same thing, but in 2023, Taco Bell brought back the Beefy Crunch Burrito after an online campaign demanded its return after a five-year absence. That's not quite the Beefy Fritos Burrito, still absent from the Taco Bell menu as of 2025, but the limited-time offering was a reasonable stand-in for its less spicy cousin, comprised of roughly the same ingredients with the notable alteration exception of Flamin' Hot Fritos.

It doesn't seem like there would be much of a difference between similar menu items, but it apparently takes significantly more effort, time, and money to make a Grilled Steak Taco inside a Taco Bell kitchen than it does to make a soft taco with ground beef or chicken. When Taco Bell announced major changes to its menu in the summer of 2020, beset by labor and economic issues from the COVID-19 pandemic that affected business on every level, the Grilled Steak Taco was the only taco deemed necessary to abolish.

Generous with both premium protein and vegetables, the Grilled Steak Taco consisted of a tortilla stuffed with sliced and seasoned beef, real cheese, diced tomatoes, lettuce, and a lime sauce. Ever since the pandemic changes of 2020, the Taco Bell menu continued to evolve, with more items coming and going, but not the Grilled Steak Taco. No steak tacos of any kind are presently available to order off the menu at the chain.

When Taco Bell revealed in July 2020 that in a matter of weeks, it would retire a series of menu items that proved too costly, inefficient, or time-consuming to prepare in its thousands of kitchens during the stress of the early COVID-19 pandemic, one long-standing entree marked for demise was the Nachos Supreme. A moderately sided nachos plate, one step up from chips and cheese sauce and not as hefty as the Nachos BellGrande, it combined chips, beef, beans, and condiments.

The "supreme" designation for a product remains in effect at Taco Bell, indicating the addition of diced tomatoes and sour cream to multiple menu items. But the Nachos Supreme, by name and standard preparation, is still unavailable at Taco Bell years after its disappearance. However, the 2020s offering called the Loaded Beef Nachos is almost the same product as the Nachos Supreme. Instead of diced tomatoes, it's made with guacamole, but otherwise it's the same old combination of chips, cheese sauce, seasoned beef, beans, sour cream, and red sauce. Decades ago, Nachos Supreme came topped with green onions, but after an E. coli contamination of that vegetable in 2006, Taco Bell ceased usage.

Unlike the other more modern concoctions sold by Taco Bell over the years, the tostada is a traditional Mexican dish. Something like a crunchy taco, it's built on a flat, crispy, cooked corn tortilla, topped with the same kinds of fillings and sauces generally used in tacos and burritos, particularly at Taco Bell. The chain's version, which appeared under the name "tostados" on its original menu in the 1960s, was made with beans, red sauce, cheese, and lettuce. Taco Bell also sold a hotter variant of the tostada, the Spicy Tostada.

When Taco Bell pared down its menu in the summer of 2020 to account for coronavirus setbacks, the Spicy Tostada went away. Later in the year, the standard tostada also got cut. The normal one returned to Taco Bell, for a little while, as part of a throwback "Decades" campaign, but the Spicy Tostada remained in obscurity.

With the pandemic still a threat to the public's health and the usual ways of day to day life in early 2021, Chick-fil-A decided to respond to the economic pressures and problems wrought by the coronavirus with some small but pointed cuts to its expansive menu. "Streamlining our menu will allow for us to continue providing our customers the quality food and service they've come to expect, as well as make room for new future menu items," a spokesperson for the fast food chain wrote in a message to Business Insider.

Chick-fil-A removed one entire breakfast option from its offerings at the time: all bagels and bagel sandwiches. Customers could no longer order a bagel of any kind during the restaurant's morning hours, be it a Sunflower Multigrain Bagel, on its own, or as part of the Chicken, Egg & Cheese Bagel Sandwich. Chick-fil-A recommends that bagel-preferring customers choose a different starch, such as a buttermilk biscuit or an English muffin. Four years later, bagels are still not sold on the Chick-fil-A breakfast menu.

Many fast food chains serve up great coffee, including Chick-fil-A, which sells a conscientiously farmed, medium-roast coffee made from premium, arabica beans and apparently boasting notes of nuttiness and caramel. Iced, and a shake-like blended version of the coffee, also grace the Chick-fil-A menu, but one common if decreasingly popular variant no longer available at the fast food chicken chain is coffee without the kick.

Many people enjoy the taste of the hot, brewed drink but don't care for or can't physically handle the jolt of caffeine a regular cup of the stuff provides. Such customers are out of luck at Chick-fil-A, which took decaf coffee off of its menu chain-wide in early 2021. It was one of a few trims to the menu in the wake of coronavirus-era economic concerns. By focusing on the menu items that sold well, Chick-fil-A could operate in a more financially beneficial manner. Decaffeinated coffee sold so poorly up to that point that it wasn't money-wise to keep brewing up pot after pot, day after day.

The changes made by fast food restaurants to meet operational challenges brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic in the early 2020s were felt in subtle ways. There were apparently many redundancies and unnecessary options in the fast food space, and Chick-fil-A in particular utilized a menu recall to get rid of some extraneous choices.

In January 2020, three months before the pandemic hit in the U.S., the chicken restaurant chain test-marketed a smaller menu at select stores in North Carolina and Arizona. In February 2021, it rolled out some of those tweaks across the country, notably overhauling its kid's menu. Prior to that point, the Chick-fil-A chicken nuggets kid's meal was offered in two permutations: one with six nuggets, and one with four nuggets. In the tryout, and then nationally, Chick-fil-A simplified it so that the chicken nuggets kid's meal was available in only a five-nugget option. That shift was permanent — as of 2025, that's the only way to get a Chick-fil-A chicken nuggets kid's meal.

While it's not specifically a food that Chick-fil-A did away with during its menu revamp in 2021, one decision it made regarding packaging and customer choice did alter the makeup of how the restaurant chain does business. So as to improve the quickness and accuracy of its kitchens' output while operating under coronavirus restrictions and setbacks, Chick-fil-A streamlined its sizing system across multiple menu parts, including desserts and beverage options.

Chick-fil-A's trademarked Icedream, a low-fat, ice cream-like frozen dessert, was previously sold in cones or in several sizes of cups. After the reboot, the Icedream comes in just one size. Similarly, Chick-fil-A's coffee, both hot and iced versions, are permanently limited to one size each: 12 ounces and 16 ounces, respectively. That 16-ounce size is also now the only size offered for Chick-Fil-A's lines of milkshakes and Frosted Beverages, too, including lemonade, limeade, and coffee options.

The economic repercussions of the coronavirus pandemic were widely felt even years after the mass lockdowns ended and public masking mandates eased up. New variants of COVID-19 regularly sprung up throughout the 2020s, while the U.S. still tried to make sense of a post-pandemic economy with demographic shifts in the labor force and significant inflation leading to fundamental changes in the way companies did business. Fast food chains still had the coronavirus to blame for changes in consumer preferences and supply chain issues.

In February 2022, Restaurant Brands International, the overarching company in charge of Burger King, announced price hikes for some menu items and the repricing of others, namely that it would no longer include its signature burger, the Whopper, in discounts and promotions. The fast food heavyweight also analyzed its sales figures and realized that so few people were buying some sweet items that it could no longer justify the cost of keeping them on the menu. As of 2022 then, Burger King no longer sold ice cream sundaes or chocolate milk. It also stopped stocking restaurants with the whipped-cream-like topping used on various desserts, because it just wasn't a popular add-on. As of 2025, none of those items are available at Burger King.