We Tried Chick-Fil-A's Frosted Cloudberry Lemonade. Here's How It Went

The calendar is turning from spring to summer and the mercury is rising, which means many of us are craving frozen beverages. Chick-fil-A knows a thing or two about satisfying customers' cravings, so it only makes sense that it would release a special limited-time-only frozen drink to celebrate the warm weather.

The Frosted Cloudberry Lemonade combines two things people love from Chick-fil-A: ice cream and lemonade, and adds a shot of the chain's Cloudberry flavor. The Cloudberry flavor first debuted in the Cloudberry Sunjoy, a fruity take on Chick-fil-A's beloved lemonade-iced tea blend that was released nationwide in April 2022. If you've never heard of cloudberries before, don't worry: neither had we until Chick-fil-A introduced us to them. Keep reading, because we'll tell you everything you need to know about cloudberries. Even more importantly, we'll tell you if you should buy the Frosted Cloudberry Lemonade the next time you roll through Chick-fil-A's drive-thru, or if you should just stick with a tried-and-true favorite.

Per Chick-fil-A's website, the Frosted Cloudberry Lemonade is a regular Frosted Lemonade with cherry blossom and cloudberry flavoring. A Frosted Lemonade is a blend of lemonade and Icedream. Yes, Icedream, not ice cream. As we've covered before, Chick-fil-A's vanilla soft-serve dessert does not meet the legal requirements to be called ice cream because it doesn't contain enough fat. However, we won't hold that against it, because it's still really tasty. Although Chick-fil-A lemonade isn't squeezed in-store anymore, it's still delicious as well, so it's hard to lose with a combination of the two. If you'd like, you can substitute the lemonade for diet lemonade or iced tea.

The lemonade and frozen dessert components of this drink are pretty straightforward, but what about cloudberries? According to Farm Flavor, cloudberries look similar to raspberries or blackberries, but with a rich red-orange color. This sweet-and-sour berry grows well in cold places like Canada, Russia, and Scandinavia. Chick-fil-A says that cloudberry plants can take as long as seven years to bear fruit. The chain compares the berry's flavor to a blend of passionfruit, mango, raspberry, and apricot. As for cherry blossoms, posters on Reddit claim that they have a faint floral taste (makes sense for a flower) with a slightly bitter edge.

According to QSR, the Frosted Cloudberry Lemonade is being sold nationwide, though only at participating Chick-fil-A's, so you might want to confirm that your local restaurant has it before heading out to buy one. Much like the carefree days of early summer before the weather gets oppressively hot, the Frosted Cloudberry Lemonade will be gone faster than you might like. It hit stores on May 19, and it's only sticking around until June 11.

At our local Chick-fil-A, the Frosted Cloudberry Lemonade costs $4.79. The price you pay might be different depending on where you live. That's only 30 cents more than the regular Frosted Lemonade costs, so you're not paying too much extra money for the cloudberry flavoring. However, a medium normal lemonade is only $2.59, so you're definitely paying a premium to mix it with Icedream. We thought the flavor was worth the price, but almost five dollars for a drink does feel a little expensive.

Chick-fil-A has a fairly expansive drink menu. In addition to lemonade, diet lemonade, sweet tea, unsweet tea, and the Arnold Palmer-like Sunjoy, the chain also sells all the soft drinks you would expect at a fast food place (including some more niche options like Powerade and Hi-C). There's also juice, milk, and coffee. Interestingly, you can buy a 5-pound bag of ice from the chain, which isn't an option you find at most restaurants.

As we mentioned before, you can get one other drink with the Cloudberry flavor: a Cloudberry Sunjoy. The Frosted Cloudberry Lemonade is actually in the Treats section of the menu, rather than the Drinks section. On that section of the menu, you can also get Frosted Coffee, a variety of milkshakes, an Icedream cup or cone, and baked desserts. After sampling the Frosted Cloudberry Lemonade, we would classify it halfway between a drink and a dessert. It's kind of like a slushie or a milkshake with a fruity edge. It definitely fills you up more than a normal soft drink would.

Per Chick-fil-A's website, a Frosted Cloudberry Lemonade contains 340 calories, 50 of which are from fat. It has 5 grams of fat total, including 3.5 grams of saturated fat. This drink also has 20 milligrams of cholesterol, 6 grams of protein, and 69 grams of carbs.

All those numbers don't sound too scary, though 340 calories might be more than you'd want to regularly consume in beverage form. The one eye-popping nutrition stat in this beverage is the amount of sugar: 61 grams. That's about as much sugar as one and a half cans of Coke. If you drink one of these every once in a while, you've got nothing to worry about, but consuming too much sugar can have a variety of negative effects on both your physical and mental health. Ordering the drink with diet lemonade lowers the calories and sugar, but not as much as you might expect. With diet lemonade, you're looking at 270 calories and 42 grams of sugar.

According to Farm Flavor, cloudberries are high in vitamins C, A, and E, but we don't know if these little berries are giving you any health benefits once they're mixed with soft serve and lemonade.

We have never had the privilege of sampling either cloudberries or cherry blossoms, so we can't tell you how well the Frosted Cloudberry Lemonade replicated those flavors, but we can tell you that it tasted good.

It didn't actually have much lemonade flavor at all, though it did have a little bit of tang that we assume was from the lemon. The overall effect was a mix of fruit and dairy flavors with no single element standing out or dominating any of the rest. The mild sourness combined with the Icedream reminded us of frozen yogurt a little bit, but an even more apt comparison would be orange or peach sherbert. We noticed a little bit of a raspberry-esque taste, so maybe that was the cloudberry shining through.

The texture of this drink was great. It was thick enough to feel substantial but loose enough to easily drink with a straw. It was cold and frozen, but the ice crystals were super small, giving the beverage a pleasantly creamy mouthfeel. Overall, this drink was unlike any other fast food frozen beverage we've sampled, and it's worth a try simply based on its uniqueness alone.