Georgia-Born Chick-fil-A Lost Its Spot as America’s Favorite Fast-Food Chain This Year
Eleven years straight, the American Customer Satisfaction Index named the same fast-food chain the country’s most satisfying, and the streak belonged to Chick-fil-A.
It fell to second place this year.
That’s a big shift for a company that built its name in a single Georgia diner decades before it grew into a nationally known fast-food brand.
Here’s how Chick-fil-A lost its spot as America’s favorite fast-food chain in 2026.
How the Ranking Was Determined
The American Customer Satisfaction Index, or ACSI, has tracked how happy Americans are with the businesses they use, fast-food chains among them, since the 1990s.
It’s not a popularity poll.
For its 2026 restaurant report, ACSI reached out to 16,464 people who had eaten at these chains.
It contacted them at random by email between April 2025 and March 2026.
Each person answered a few short questions about their most recent visit, and ACSI turned those answers into a single score out of 100.
Here’s what changed at the top once every chain’s score came in.
A Single Diner Outside Atlanta
Chick-fil-A started as a single diner in Hapeville, Georgia, a small town that sits in Atlanta’s shadow near the airport.
Truett Cathy opened the restaurant in 1946 and called it the Dwarf Grill.
It wasn’t a chain yet.
Cathy built the pressure-cooked chicken sandwich that made the company famous right there, years before the Chick-fil-A name existed anywhere else.
The first restaurant to carry that name opened in 1967, inside Atlanta’s Greenbriar Shopping Center.
The company moved its headquarters to Atlanta in 1982, and it’s stayed there ever since.
Chick-fil-A now runs 3,287 restaurants nationwide and pulls in nearly $24 billion a year.
That’s a lot of chicken sandwiches for a company that started with one dwarf-sized diner and a pressure fryer.
None of that growth had cost Chick-fil-A the top spot in customer satisfaction, not until 2026.
The One-Point Flip
Chick-fil-A didn’t collapse in the rankings.
The gap was one point.
Jersey Mike’s finished the American Customer Satisfaction Index’s 2026 survey at 84 out of 100.
Chick-fil-A held at 83, the same score it posted a year earlier.
That single point ended Chick-fil-A’s 11-year run at the top of ACSI’s fast-food category.
Chick-fil-A’s score is still far ahead of the industry’s average of 79.
How ACSI Builds Chick-fil-A’s Score
Chick-fil-A’s 83 comes from three separate questions the American Customer Satisfaction Index, or ACSI, asks about a customer’s most recent visit.
ACSI asks how satisfied customers felt overall, whether the visit met their expectations, and how close it came to their idea of a perfect fast-food experience.
ACSI rates each answer on a 1-to-10 scale and combines them into the final 0-to-100 score.
That same three-question math produced Jersey Mike’s 84.
Who Took the Top Spot
Jersey Mike’s got its start as a single sub shop in Point Pleasant, New Jersey, back in 1956.
Peter Cancro bought the shop in 1975 and spent the next several decades building it into a nationwide chain.
It’s called Jersey Mike’s Subs today, a name the company adopted once franchising took off in 1987.
Franchising changed everything.
The chain now has more than 4,000 locations open or in development across the country.
ACSI researchers pointed to consistency across the whole visit, not just price, as what separates today’s top-ranked chains from the rest.
This year, that description fit a sub shop from the Jersey Shore better than it fit Chick-fil-A.
A Different Franchise Model
Chick-fil-A requires every operator to run the restaurant personally, full time, with no outside job.
The initial fee is only $10,000, far below the roughly $50,000 many other major fast-food brands charge to open a location.
That low number is misleading: Chick-fil-A typically won’t let one operator run more than a single restaurant.
Jersey Mike’s took a different route, franchising fast starting in 1987 and growing to more than 4,000 locations in under 40 years.
Chick-fil-A’s model favors control over speed.
Jersey Mike’s model favors speed over control.
This year, speed won.
Psst! How much do you know about the fast-food chains behind America’s favorite rankings? Take our quiz and see how many you can get right.
Quiz
Fast-Food Chain IQ
Answer these questions on the fast-food chains behind America’s favorite rankings. We bet you can’t get them all right. Prove us wrong?
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Where Other Chains Ranked
Chick-fil-A and Jersey Mike's weren't the only chains ACSI scored in its 2026 fast-food report.
KFC placed third at 80, the closest score to the top two.
Raising Cane's matched the industry's 79 average.
That average has held for three years running.
Culver's and Burger King each posted 78.
Wingstop and Sonic tied at 77, and Popeyes trailed the field at 73.
None came close.
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