What Fast-Food Onion Rings Are Vegan?

However, the one fast-food restaurant chain that does offer vegan onion rings is Sonic. Although sonic onion rings used to contain dairy and egg, they recently changed their recipe to improve the shelf life of their onion rings.

Yes, Sonic onion rings are considered vegan. They managed to forego both milk and eggs in their batter. This is a good example of how foods can be so highly processed that they end up being more vegan-friendly, as food manufacturers swap out milk and egg for ingredients that have a longer shelf-life.

More often than not, the onion ring batter used in restaurants contains milk and eggs, which is double trouble for vegans. Lacto-ovo vegetarians needn’t be worried about eggs or milk, but vegans will need to extra cautious when it comes to onion rings.

Onion rings are a very popular snack food regardless of the country you live in and you can typically find them at fast-food restaurants, and in supermarkets at the frozen foods aisle.

No, Burker King onion rings are not considered vegan. While the batter is eggless, it does contain a milk derivative—namely, whey protein. Whey is only found in milk (it’s the second most abundant protein in milk), so it’s always dairy-derived and thus never vegan.

They informed us that the onion rings are battered in the vanilla soft serve mix which is listed as containing diary on the Sonic allergen guide even though the allergen guide also states that the onion rings do not contain diary. We have contacted Sonic’s customer support multiple times about this topic and have received no response.