Chick-Fil-A Employees Are Sharing What They Really Do With Dropped Condiments

We've probably all had those days at work when everything just seems to go wrong. Maybe you're running late, or have forgotten something important, or maybe you happen to drop a huge amount of Chick-fil-A sauces on the floor — as was recently the case for one unlucky Chick-fil-A worker. The exasperated employee took to Reddit for advice about this unfortunate scenario, posting a picture of the pile of overturned Chick-fil-A sauce packets and asking their fellow workers, "What would you do in this situation?"

Several users saw the picture and simply responded, "Cry," and while that is certainly an understandable reaction, others did have some more helpful answers. "Sanitize with wipes," suggested one person. But another savvy employee had an even better idea: "I usually just throw em in a 12-qt of sanitizer water," u/yoitsthew recommended. This soaking method certainly ensures the outside of the sauce packets are completely sanitized, and it even has an added bonus: This practice is a "good way to weed out the unsealed ones," u/mr-ratburn04 said.

It seems that the official Chick-fil-A policy is to sanitize the unopened condiment packets and then restock them if they fall on the floor. And as long as the packets are completely sealed, there should be nothing wrong with cleaning and reusing the dropped condiments, as long as the employee is cleaning using an antibacterial cleaning solution. Antibacterial sanitizers don't just clean items, but disinfect them, killing any potential harmful germs that may have spread to the packets from the floor, such as Salmonella, E. coli, and Rhinovirus, via the Cleaning Institute.

So long as the dropped packets are unsealed and sanitized, they should be perfectly safe to consume, even if they did spend a little time on the floor. However, a few workers definitely felt like sanitizing all these packets could be a daunting, not to mention time-consuming, task. "I'd throw 'em away bc [sic] operator could be giving me a raise to care more but here we are," wrote one user. A few other employees agreed that "trash" was the way to go with this huge pile. "If I had my way; screw it. They touched the ground, toss 'em, but the trained me says, 'sanitizer wipe em,'" u/TheWatcher9834 joked.