In-N-Out took cottonseed oil out of its buns - does In-N-Out still use seed oils?
In-N-Out's buns lost cottonseed oil in 2025 and sesame flour in September 2026. The fries are still sunflower oil and the Spread is still a seed oil base. Here's every ingredient change, sourced, and how to order around what's left.
Emily Harper
Short answer first, because it's the thing people actually type into Google: In-N-Out removed cottonseed oil from its buns, and as of September 2026 it removed sesame flour too. The fries are still cooked in sunflower oil. The Spread is still built on a seed oil base. So the bun got cleaner, and the two things people ask about most did not change.
Here's the whole picture, sourced line by line.
What changed in the buns
Two separate announcements, sixteen months apart, both landed on the bun.
May 2025 — cottonseed oil and calcium propionate. In a list of ingredient changes published by owner and president Lynsi Snyder, one line covered the bun directly: "Replaced calcium propionate with natural enzymes in our buns and removed cottonseed oil." (Newsweek, KSAT) Calcium propionate is a mold inhibitor. Cottonseed oil is a seed oil, and it was in the dough.
September 2026 — sesame flour. In-N-Out posted an update on September 8, 2026 saying its buns no longer contain sesame flour, alongside a switch from iodized salt packets to sea salt (Fox Business, Tasting Table). Sesame flour had been in the dough at some locations since 2024, which meant anyone with a sesame allergy was stuck ordering protein style.
Most coverage described the sesame removal as happening "in 10 states," which reads like a partial rollout. It isn't. In-N-Out operates in exactly ten states — California, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, Texas, Oregon, Colorado, Idaho, Washington, and Tennessee. Ten states is every store it has.
The company's current allergen chart lines up with that. The Bun row now marks sesame with an asterisk, In-N-Out's symbol for "produced in a facility where allergen is present," rather than the checkmark it uses for "allergen is an ingredient" (In-N-Out allergen information).
What In-N-Out hasn't said: what replaced the cottonseed oil
"Removed cottonseed oil" is not the same sentence as "there is no seed oil in the bun," and In-N-Out hasn't published a full bun ingredient list to close the gap. Enriched bread dough of this kind normally carries some fat, and the company has never said what took cottonseed oil's place.
The allergen chart can't settle it either, and it's worth knowing why. Under federal allergen law, highly refined oils made from major allergens are exempt from allergen labeling, because the refining process strips out the protein that causes reactions (FDA guidance). A bun made with refined soybean oil would carry no "contains soy" declaration at all. In-N-Out's chart does mark soy on the Bun row — but with the facility asterisk, which is exactly what you'd see whether refined soybean oil is in there or not. The chart is silent on the question by design.
So the honest status of the bun is: cottonseed oil confirmed gone, sesame flour confirmed gone, replacement fat unconfirmed.
The fries are still sunflower oil
This is the single most-searched version of the question, and the answer hasn't moved. In-N-Out's own Food Quality page still says the fries are "individually cut in our stores, and then cooked in 100% sunflower oil."
Sunflower oil is a seed oil. It's a better one than most of what's in fast food fryers — high-oleic sunflower is far more heat-stable than soybean or canola — but it is not beef tallow, which is what most of the industry fried in until the late 1980s.
Snyder has said the company is "researching an even better-quality oil for our fries." That is the entire public commitment: research. No oil named, no date attached.
The Spread is the real seed oil problem
The Spread goes on nearly every burger on the menu. In-N-Out's published 2020 ingredient and allergen chart lists it on a soybean and/or canola oil base, alongside corn syrup, xanthan gum, polysorbate 80, and calcium disodium EDTA.
Nothing in the 2025 or 2026 announcements touched the oil in it. Turmeric replaced Yellow 5 in the Spread, and real sugar replaced high-fructose corn syrup in it — both swaps made inside the same seed oil base.
Everything else In-N-Out has changed since 2025
The bun work was one item on a longer list. Per Restaurant Business and Good Morning America:
- Red No. 40 is out of the Strawberry Shake and Signature Pink Lemonade, replaced with beta carotene and vegetable juice for color.
- Yellow No. 5 is out of the chilies, pickles, and Spread, replaced with turmeric.
- High-fructose corn syrup is out of the shake mix, strawberry syrup, Spread, and Pink Lemonade, replaced with real sugar. The ketchup has been transitioning to a real-sugar formula since 2025.
- Artificial vanilla in the shake mix was replaced with natural vanilla, and artificial flavors came out of the chocolate syrup and hot cocoa.
- Sucralose and saccharin packets are off the condiment counter, replaced by stevia leaf extract and an oat milk creamer option.
- Iodized salt packets became sea salt in 2026.
That is a specific, checkable list, not a marketing paragraph — and it's a bigger swing than most billion-dollar chains have taken on a menu that hasn't fundamentally changed since 1948.
Why the dye timing mattered
On April 22, 2025, HHS and the FDA announced a plan to eliminate petroleum-based synthetic dyes from the U.S. food supply. Citrus Red No. 2 and Orange B are being revoked outright; Green No. 3, Red No. 40, Yellow No. 5, Yellow No. 6, Blue No. 1, and Blue No. 2 are supposed to be gone by the end of 2026.
Worth saying plainly: the phase-out runs on voluntary compliance. Nothing in the announcement is a binding rule with a penalty attached. Most chains are waiting to see whether anyone enforces it. In-N-Out moved a year and a half early.
On the science, here's the honest version. California's Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment spent roughly two years on a formal risk assessment and concluded that synthetic food dyes are associated with inattentiveness, hyperactivity, and restlessness in some children, not all of them — an effect EWG's summary notes shows up in kids with and without a prior behavioral diagnosis. The FDA's own position is more cautious: in its phase-out announcement, it stated that a causal relationship between color additives and hyperactivity "has not been established" for the general population. Both are true at once.
How to order at In-N-Out if you're avoiding seed oils
- Skip the Spread. It's the highest-volume seed oil on the menu and nothing about it has changed. Ask for mustard or ketchup instead — neither has added oil.
- Skip the fries, or accept sunflower oil knowingly. Ordering them "light" or "well done" changes the texture, not the oil.
- The bun is the improved part now — no cottonseed oil, no sesame flour, no calcium propionate — though what replaced the cottonseed oil is still unpublished.
- Protein style removes the bun entirely, but it does not remove the Spread. Order it protein style and no spread if that's the goal.
- Shakes and Pink Lemonade are the clearest win on the artificial-ingredient side: real sugar, no Red 40.
- The patty and cheese are the simple part. In-N-Out has always ground its own 100% USDA chuck with no additives, fillers, or preservatives, and the American cheese is real cheese.
The harder question: everywhere else you eat
In-N-Out is one restaurant, and it's unusually forthcoming — it publishes an allergen chart, it names its fryer oil on its own website, and its president lists ingredient changes publicly. Most places you eat do none of that. There is no barcode on a restaurant and no label on a plate.
The restaurant map in Tallow is built for exactly that gap. Open it and you see the restaurants around you scored 0–100 on what's actually in the kitchen, with seed oils weighted three times heavier than anything else in the blend — it's the category that moves the number most, on purpose. Scores come from people who ate there or asked the kitchen directly, and every answer carries how they know it, so one public statement from the restaurant outweighs four hunches. Chains are rated as one, so a single rating of an In-N-Out in Texas counts toward In-N-Out everywhere. And nothing gets guessed: a restaurant nobody has rated shows up gray, not green.
You can also tell it you only care about seed oils, and the entire map re-scores to that one question.
Open the restaurant map in Tallow → · See exactly how restaurant scores are calculated
Ingredient details in this post come from In-N-Out's own public statements and published charts, and can change without notice as reformulations roll out location by location. This is not medical advice.