The people behind food.fast and why they write it
Why This Site Exists
An independent, ad-free reference for chain food and how to make it yourself - built because eating out stopped being the cheap option.
Last reviewed
The number that started it
A household ordering takeaway twice a week, at the average delivery-app basket size the apps themselves report, spends more across a year on those two evenings than on their annual energy bill. That is not a rhetorical device. It is two published figures next to each other, and once you have seen it you cannot unsee it.
What makes it sharper is that nothing about the food changed to justify it. A burger sauce is still six ingredients and a bowl. A peri-peri marinade is still a blender, a lemon and twenty minutes. The gap between what those things cost to make and what they cost to buy has simply widened, and a large part of the widening is fees rather than food.
What is on this site
Copycat recipes for the items people actually order from the chains we cover. Every page carries a complete method, context-specific troubleshooting, a cost calculation, batch scaling and both cup and metric measurements. A page claims first-hand testing only when a dated cook record supports that claim.
Chain menus and prices for thirty-five chains across eleven countries - over fifteen thousand menu items with nearly twenty thousand recorded prices. This is what lets a recipe page show you what the thing it copies actually costs where you live, and it is also, on its own, the most complete answer to "how much is a Whopper in Australia" that we know of.
Guides on the mechanics underneath the recipes: why a smashed patty browns the way it does, why pan pizza is a frying technique rather than a baking one, what a delivery app really adds to a bill, and how to read a chain's own ingredient list.
Tools that came out of the recipes: a unit converter that knows ingredient densities, a recipe scaler, oven and air fryer converters, and a calculator for working out what your own habit costs.
What is not on this site
No advertising. No affiliate links in a method. No sponsored content. No user ratings. No fabricated authors, tests or reviews. No cookie banner, because there is nothing that needs consent. AI-generated illustrations are labelled; AI assistance never substitutes for claim verification or editorial review.
There is also, deliberately, no recipe for most menu items. We cover thousands of items in the menu data and a few dozen in the recipe section, because a recipe page should exist when there is something worth saying about making the thing. The alternative - a thin page for every item on every menu - would be a bigger site and a worse one.
Who is responsible
Current editorial is attributed to the [food.fast editors] (/team/food-fast-editors/) organisation because individual contributor details have not been independently verified for publication. This is less impressive than a row of expert biographies and more trustworthy than inventing them.
How it is paid for
It is not, yet, and that is a real answer rather than a coy one. The site is run at cost by the people writing it. If that changes, the way it changes will be disclosed here and on the editorial standards page before it affects anything you read.
Getting in touch
Corrections, recipe failures, missing menu prices and requests all go to the same place: the contact page. Several of the troubleshooting sections on this site exist because somebody wrote in to say a recipe had gone wrong for them, which is the most useful email we get.