McDonald's dropped beef tallow in 1990. Steak 'n Shake just brought it back for everything
Steak 'n Shake swapped seed oils for 100% beef tallow, then added grass-fed beef, A2 milk and cane sugar Coke under a new Chief MAHA Officer. Here's what the science does and doesn't back up, and the fry supply-chain gap the switch didn't originally close.
Emily Harper
McDonald's fried its French fries in pure beef tallow from the 1940s until 1990, when a public pressure campaign over saturated fat pushed the chain to vegetable oil. Steak 'n Shake just spent the last 20 months undoing that switch for its entire menu — not just the fryer, but the butter, the milk, and the soda too.
The fryer switch that started it
On January 16, 2025, Steak 'n Shake announced it would cook its fries, tots, onion rings and chicken tenders in 100% beef tallow at all locations by the end of February. "Our fries will now be cooked in an authentic way, 100% beef tallow, in order to achieve the highest quality and best taste," said Chris Ward, the chain's chief supply chain officer, in the announcement. Chief Global Development Officer Kristen Briede added that "by adopting 100% beef tallow, Steak 'n Shake is delivering the best fries possible." A poll the chain ran days earlier found 90.5% of respondents in favor.
It's the same reversal McDonald's made in the other direction 35 years earlier. McDonald's fries were cooked in tallow for decades before businessman Phil Sokolof's anti-saturated-fat ad campaign helped push the industry toward vegetable oil in 1990 — a switch that also introduced partially hydrogenated (trans) fats nobody was screening for at the time.
It didn't stop at the fryer
Since the tallow announcement, Steak 'n Shake has systematically pulled seed oils and their substitutes out of everything else on the menu:
- December 1, 2025 — switched to A2 milk and A2 milk-based Hershey's shakes, marketed on the claim that milk from cows producing only the A2 beta-casein protein digests more easily for some people.
- 100% Grade A Wisconsin butter, sourced from a single family farm, replacing a buttery spread blend that had contained seed oil.
- Cane Sugar Coke, offered alongside the standard high-fructose-corn-syrup version.
- June 1, 2026 — every Steakburger switched to 100% grass-fed, grass-finished beef with no added antibiotics or hormones, which the chain says makes it the only major U.S. burger chain sourcing beef that way. "America deserves the best," the company posted.
- September 1, 2026 — a new Protein Steakburger (lettuce-wrapped, 530 calories, 31g protein, 6g carbs) and a Double Steakburger Double Cheese (690 calories, 31g protein, 38g carbs) built around the grass-fed beef.
Why this is happening now
In April 2026, Steak 'n Shake hired Michael Boes — a former senior advisor at HHS under Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — as its first Chief MAHA Officer. The company frames the entire overhaul as restoring the "original spirit of American fast food": "Fast food does not have to mean processed or artificial," Boes said. President Trump publicly cheered the moves, commenting "Awesome" on the chain's announcement. It's a marketing strategy as much as a supply-chain one — Steak 'n Shake has openly tied its ingredient changes to the "Make America Healthy Again" movement and picked up political endorsements along the way.
What the science actually says — and doesn't
Here's where it gets more complicated than a press release. Beef tallow is roughly 50% saturated fat, 42% monounsaturated fat and just 4% polyunsaturated fat, per USDA nutrient data for the standard reference item. That low polyunsaturated content is genuinely relevant at frying temperature: a 2021 study in the peer-reviewed journal Foods found that oils high in polyunsaturated fat, like soybean and corn oil, generated substantially more oxidation byproducts (aldehydes) than monounsaturated-dominant oils like olive and avocado oil when heated repeatedly at 180°C — evidence that PUFA-heavy oils break down faster under high heat than tallow's mostly saturated-and-monounsaturated profile does.
That's a real, testable difference in how these fats behave in a fryer. It is not the same as settled proof that frying in tallow is healthier to eat than frying in seed oil. The American Heart Association's own April 2026 dietary guidance still recommends keeping saturated fat under 6% of daily calories and continues to name soybean and canola oil as preferred replacements for saturated fat, citing evidence linking that swap to lower cardiovascular risk. Both things are true at once: seed oils may hold up worse in the fryer itself, while major cardiology guidance still argues for eating less saturated fat overall. Steak 'n Shake's fries switch resolves the first question; it doesn't settle the second.
The gap between the sign and the supply chain
There's also a catch worth knowing before you order. Not long after the tallow switch, health creator Bobby Parrish found the ingredient label on Steak 'n Shake's frozen fry supply and discovered the fries had been par-fried at the manufacturer in vegetable oil — soybean or canola — before ever touching a restaurant's tallow fryer. Steak 'n Shake's own site now says it went back to its fry manufacturer specifically to eliminate that par-fry step "at a considerable cost," and states its fries and tots are fully seed-oil free today. The company hasn't said exactly when that fix took effect relative to Parrish's video — a reminder that a "100% beef tallow" sign describes the last step of a supply chain, not necessarily every step in it.
That gap is exactly the kind of thing a menu board can't tell you and a press release won't volunteer. If you're trying to figure out whether a chain's "seed oil free" or "grass-fed" claim actually holds up by the time the ingredient list is final, or whether a packaged product in your cart still lists soybean or canola oil further down, search it on the Tallow app before you order or buy.