You’re lovin’ it — but is it too good to be true?
A McDonald’s employee revealed how their iced tea is made — and claim it’s a lot sweeter than most customer’s might think.
TikTok user @gia2bad claims she’s letting viewers in on how the beloved drink is really made, leaving them stunned at what they’ve allegedly been consuming.
In the now-viral video — which has garnered 1.3 million views and 101,700 likes as of Monday morning — Gia exposed the fast food chain for putting an entire four-pound bag of sugar into their iced tea.
“If y’all were wondering why the sweet tea so sweet at McDonald’s,” she wrote in the text over the video, which showed her emptying a bag of White Satin sugar into a bucket of tea and stirring it up.
“Yes we use a whole bag sometimes 2,” she added in the caption.
Viewers rushed to the comments to express their shock.
“I been looking at this for hours,” one person commented.
“Would you like some tea with your sugar,” someone quipped.
“Jaw = dropped that’s literally cancer,” another wrote.
“I’m about to get diabetes,” one commented.
“I remember I took a sip and almost passed out,” a viewer added. “it was so f–king sweet It was like ten cans of diabetes.”
However, some people in the comments section claimed that they don’t use this method at their respective McDonald’s, noting that different locations have different ways of making the iced tea.
The Dietary Guidelines for Americans recommends that added sugars should make up less than 10% of total daily calories, according to the US Food and Drug Administration.
For example, a 2,000-calorie daily diet would permit for 200 calories worth of added sugars, or 50 grams, per day.
The McDonald’s website lists a large sweet tea as having 40 grams of sugar, though employees are suggesting there’s significantly more than that.
The Post has reached out to the fast food chain for comment.
Meanwhile, Gia isn’t the only McDonald’s worker who’s claimed that they use four pounds of sugar to make the drink.
A former manager for the golden arches eatery said in a TikTok that went viral in 2022 that they do indeed use that much sugar for their sweet tea.
“I was a manager at a McDonald’s. I worked there for about three years,” Nicole Weiser said, per Yahoo!’s Eat This, Not That blog.
Explaining that they kept the sweet tea in a four-gallon red container and the unsweet tea in a four-gallon green container, she added, “For every four gallons of the red jug, the sweet tea, there was a full four-pound bag of sugar emptied into it.”
[Written in collaboration with other media outlets with information from the following sources]
