Does Five Guys Really Not Have Any Freezers?

One of the biggest marketing claims Five Guys makes is that they do not use freezers. In an industry built on shipping frozen food across the country in refrigerated trucks, this claim sounds almost impossible.

If you get a job at Five Guys, you will quickly discover that the claim is 100% true. There is not a single freezer in any Five Guys location. Here is how they operate without one, and how it impacts your daily job as an employee.

The Walk-In Cooler is Everything

Instead of freezers, Five Guys relies entirely on a massive walk-in cooler. Because the food is fresh, the shelf life is incredibly short. This means the General Manager has to be an absolute expert at inventory ordering. If they order too much beef, it spoils and goes in the trash. If they order too little, the store runs out of food by 7:00 PM.

Daily Prep is Intense

Because there are no frozen foods to just dump into a fryer, the morning prep shift at Five Guys is grueling.

• The Beef: The meat arrives fresh in vacuum-sealed tubes. The prep team has to manually weigh out and hand-roll every single hamburger patty for the day. A busy store might roll 1,000 to 2,000 patties by hand every morning.
• The Produce: You cannot buy pre-chopped frozen onions. Employees must hand-chop fresh onions, slice fresh tomatoes, and wash fresh lettuce daily.
• The Potatoes: The fries start as 50-pound bags of raw Idaho potatoes that must be washed, run through a manual wall-mounted dicer, and soaked in cold water to remove the starch.

The Only Exception: The Ice Machine

The only machine in a Five Guys that brings water below the freezing point is the ice machine for the soda fountain. Besides that, every piece of food in the building is strictly refrigerated.

Working at Five Guys feels much more like working in a traditional, high-prep commercial kitchen than a fast-food joint. If you prefer active, hands-on cooking over just pressing buttons on a microwave, it is one of the best fast-food jobs you can get.