I Tried 6 Fast Food Grilled Cheese Sandwiches and Ranked Them Worst To Best

Kelly Vaughan

Sat, October 11, 2025 at 8:15 PM UTC

8 min read

A grilled cheese sandwich can be a comforting and satisfying meal option, whether homemade or from a fast food chain.
Six popular fast food chains were ranked based on the quality of their grilled cheese sandwiches, with Five Guys coming out on top.
Factors such as bread texture, cheese meltiness, and overall flavor contributed to the rankings, with prices varying across the different restaurants.

A good grilled cheese sandwich should consist of a few things: hot, toasted bread that's pillowy but also has some bite, flavorful American or cheddar cheese that's perfectly melted and the right ratio of bread to cheese. When done right, a grilled cheese will warm you up from the inside out.

While a homemade grilled cheese sandwich can really hit the spot when you're feeling under the weather or just craving nostalgic comfort food , a fast food grilled cheese sandwich is a great on-the-go option when you need a quick meal. For vegetarians (or folks who aren't in the mood for meat), a grilled cheese is a nice plant-based option on what is often an otherwise meat-heavy menu.

While burgers, fries and milkshakes are drive-thru heavy hitters, the grilled cheese is, in some cases, a sleeper hit. This simple sandwich is hard to pull off—and that was especially evident as I tasted six different popular grilled cheese sandwiches from nationwide chain restaurants.

It's only two ingredients, but you can get remarkably different results, depending on the type of bread, cheese and butter that are used when building the sandwich. The best grilled cheese boasts the perfect ratio of warm, golden-brown bread and ooey-gooey cheese. It's buttery without being greasy. It's good enough to eat on its own, but even better when dipped in creamy tomato soup . And I feel strongly that a grilled cheese shouldn't run you more than $10.

To find the best fast food grilled cheese sandwich, I made stops at Friendly's, Five Guys, Panera Bread, Shake Shack, Sonic and Starbucks, tasting their offerings in quick succession. By the end, I had a stomachache and a clear sense of which spots have really dialed in this childhood favorite. Read on for my list of six popular grilled cheese sandwiches, ranked worst to best.

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How I Tested These Fast Food Grilled CheeseSandwiches

To find the best fast food grilled cheese, I went to six different fast food chains across my home state of Connecticut. To make this list as useful to as many readers as possible, I chose chains that had numerous locations across the country rather than specific regional restaurants.

After researching which restaurants offered a grilled cheese sandwich on their menu, I narrowed the list down to Friendly's, Five Guys, Panera Bread, Shake Shack, Sonic and Starbucks. I ate each grilled cheese immediately in the restaurant so that I could accurately assess the texture, flavor and temperature as it was served and took detailed notes of each sandwich before finalizing my list. Because prices can vary from location to location, cost wasn't much of a factor in my ranking. However, it's worth noting that the worst grilled cheese on my list was also the most expensive.

6 Popular Fast Food Grilled Cheese Sandwiches, Ranked Worst to Best

6. Friendly's America's Best Grilled Cheese

Some things in life are best left in the past—and that includes my beloved trips to Friendly's. As a kid, my neighborhood Friendly's was THE place to get a basket of chicken strips and fries followed by a Monster Mash sundae. I was excited to step back in time and go back to try the restaurant's grilled cheese, which they confidently named "America's Best." But after trying it, I left feeling like I had lost a critical piece of my childhood.

Friendly's grilled cheese sandwich features slices of Tillamook white and yellow cheddar cheese sandwiched between two thick pieces of white bread. Unfortunately, the cooks at my local Friendly's seemed to have forgotten a critical element of a grilled cheese: the grilling. Despite the fact that the bread was warm and toasted, the plastic-like slices of cheese weren't melted..like at all.

That meant that there was no luxurious cheese pull and no crispy bits of cheese that melted and stuck to the edges of the bread. It was a sad excuse for a grilled cheese sandwich and one that I will never order again. It's also worth noting that it was $11.99, plus tax. This was by far the most expensive grilled cheese I ordered and definitely wasn't worth the price.

5. Starbucks Crispy Grilled Cheese on Sourdough

The global coffee chain's grilled cheese is the adult version of the kid-friendly snack. Instead of white bread, Starbucks builds the sandwich on crispy sourdough bread and uses a trio of white cheddar, mozzarella and Parmesan cheeses. I was excited to try this upgraded take on the classic.

But whereas the Friendly's sandwich did too little, this Starbucks sandwich was doing too much. I thought the bread was overly buttery and greasy, the sourdough flavor (which I normally love!) knocked you over the head with its insane tang and the combo of cheeses tasted a bit too funky for this simple sandwich. I appreciated the attempt at elevated flavors, but unfortunately this sandwich fell short for me.

4. Shake Shake Grilled Cheese

The burger chain combined two of their hallmark ingredients—potato buns and gooey yellow American cheese—into one griddled sandwich. It's a very similar concept to Five Guys's (more on that later), in which the cheese is layered between a sliced burger bun and the whole thing is pressed on a griddle until crispy.

When I dug in, I found that there was way too much cheese to bun. Shake Shack's signature burger buns are petite, so I think they should have dialed the cheese back to account for that. I love cheese to ooze out of my grilled cheese, but even I have my limits. Shake Shack excels at a lot of things, but making a simple grilled cheese sandwich isn't their strong suit.

3. SONIC Grilled Cheese Sandwich

When you're craving a grilled cheese on the road and don't want to spend a lot of money, you'd be hard pressed to find a better option than SONIC . The drive-in fast food chain's grilled cheese sandwich cost me exactly $3 and in a world in which nothing seems to cost that little anymore, this struck me as a great value.

But I guess in this economy, you get what you pay for. This sandwich was the smallest of the bunch and it most closely resembled a good grilled cheese one might make at home—just ordinary white sandwich bread and cheese slices. That said, the bread was appropriately toasted, the cheese was thoroughly melted and it didn't leave a pool of butter in the foil wrapper. There wasn't anything remarkable about this sandwich but there wasn't anything wrong with it either, making it a decent choice if you need a quick bite.

2. Panera Bread Grilled Cheese

With its oversized slices of white bread and ooey-gooey bright yellow cheese, Panera Bread 's grilled cheese sandwich is the platonic ideal of the childhood classic. Is it made with slices of a handcrafted artisanal boule and hand-pulled cheese from happy, grass-fed cows? Not exactly. But none of that matters when you're craving an all-American grilled cheese—and this sandwich will scratch the itch. For me, it hit the spot but there was one sandwich that narrowly outranked it.

1. Five Guys Grilled Cheese Sandwich

Five Guys was the fifth stop on my grand grilled cheese tour of Connecticut and to say that I was dreading eating yet another sandwich would be an understatement. After a string of disappointing bites and with the smell of hot peanut oil wafting through the air, I braced myself for the foil-wrapped contents.

But this unconventional grilled cheese sandwich won me over with its rich, savory flavor, perfectly toasted sesame seed bun and real-tasting cheese (or, as real as American cheese ever tastes). It's on the smaller side but fairly priced compared to its competitors. The cheese wasn't completely melted when I first took the sandwich out of the foil packaging, but it continued to melt as I ate it.

While I wished that it had been ooey-gooey right off the bat, it still was the best tasting sandwich I tried all day. After consuming an extreme amount of grilled cheese sandwiches, this is the only one that I'm genuinely excited to one day (in the far, far future) order again.

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This story was originally reported by Parade on Oct 11, 2025, where it first appeared in the Food & Drink section. Add Parade as a Preferred Source by clicking here.