McDonald’s employee claims fast food chain’s sweet tea is made with entire bag of sugar – but others disagree

‘If y’all were wondering why the sweet tea is so sweet,’ the employee wrote on TikTok

A McDonald’s employee has claimed that the fast food chain’s sweet tea is made with an entire bag of sugar.

The woman named Gia, who goes by the username @gia2bad, shared a video to TikTok last month about the apparent making of McDonald’s sweet tea. In the footage, an employee appeared to be mixing the tea, as hot water was being added to it.

Along with the two liquids, the employee went on to pour an entire four-pound bag of granulated sugar into the bucket. Gia also poked fun at the large amounts of sugar being used, as the text over the video read: “If y’all were wondering why the sweet tea is so sweet at McDonald’s.”

She also claimed that it can take more than one bag of sugar to make the tea, writing: “Yes we use a whole bag, sometimes two.”

The video went viral, with more than 1.3m views. In the comments, many people shared their shocked reactions, while poking fun at the amount of sugar filmed in the video.

“Diabetes in a cup,” one quipped, while another added: “Is no one gonna talk about the bucket.”

“That explains why it’s way too sweet. I always order half sweet and half unsweetened,” another wrote.

Despite what was shown in the video, other people claimed that they’ve worked at McDonald’s before, and they had never seen the sweet tea made in that way.

“I work there and we don’t do that…,” one wrote, while another added: “We don’t hand make sweet tea at our store it’s made with a commercial tea machine.”

“We have a machine for this… I never done this when I worked at McDonald’s,” a third agreed.

According to McDonald’s official website, the sweet tea is made from an “orange pekoe and pekoe cut black tea”. Some of the other ingredients in the cup include ice, and invert sugar, which “is an aqueous solution of inverted or partly inverted, refined or partly refined sucrose,” according to the Food and Drug Administration. McDonald’s also notes that in a large cup of the sweet tea, there are 40 grams of sugar.

According to the FDA, its Dietary Guidelines for Americans “recommends limiting calories from added sugars to less than 10 percent of total calories per day”. For example, if you eat 2,000 calories a day, you’d only have “50 grams of added sugars per day”.

The Independent has contacted Gia and a representative for McDonald’s for comment.

Gia isn’t the first McDonald’s employee to make claims about how the chain’s sweet tea is allegedly made. In a viral TikTok video made by former McDonald’s worker, Nicole, she also claimed that there was a lot of sugar used to make the tea.

“For every four gallons of the red jug, the sweet tea, there was a full four-pound bag of sugar emptied into it,” the woman, who said she was a manager at McDonald’s, explained in the since-deleted video, which has been shared on YouTube. “One pound per gallon of tea. I stopped drinking the tea after I realised that. Because that’s nasty.”