Darn you Sonic!

I stopped at Sonic yesterday and went through my usual routine. I ordered a diet drink and reinforced that I needed all components to be diet. Then when it came to the car, I asked again whether it was diet. She said it was not and brought me another drink. But, after drinking the drink, my blood sugar shot to 300. Clearly it was not diet. I hate to be that lady at Sonic who constantly pesters them about making sure my drink is correct, but I’ve been burned more than once even after asking them to double check. When they get it right, it’s a great treat. But, when they get it wrong, I pay the price.

Sonic is one of the worst about getting drinks right. I always test the drinks with a meter.

1 Like

I used to be a manager at McDonalds. It may help to call and complain in a friendly way. I would always write the customers name down and give them a free drink and side when something like this happened. Might get some free food out of it.

@tiaE, do you just add a drop of the drink to a test strip? What kind of number do you observe with diet and with regular pop? I’ve never done this and now rarely order a soft drink. But it would be great to be able to test when I want a soda and not suffer the extended hyper.

@Terry4 just a quick dip straight into the cup, but only a touch. You’ll get an error or low reading (20-30, or just “low”) for sugar free, depending upon which brand of meter/strip. The Sonic regular limeade reads 300+. I haven’t had a soda in a while but IIRC it reads similarly.

It’s worth the cost of a strip to not be surprised by a high. My husband can taste the difference easily, but my daughter & I have a hard time. I’d rather be sure.

What sort of drink? They have all sorts of green river-type of drinks and may have diet cola but then dump in a shot of syrup that may account for a spike. I am not 100% sure if they’d stock all of the flavor stuff in diet. Perhaps it would be nice of them to disclose that but they are very much of the “give the people what they want…” mind set and might not consider what’s going on. It may not be possible to get every drink in pure diet form…

I’m pretty sure that it was the flavoring. I ordered a Diet Cherry Limeade and it tasted Diet to me, and yet it didn’t. I will give that there are a million Sonic variations and I’m sure its tough for them to keep them all straight. I just need to be more insistent when I order and tell them that I need Diet all the way through, from the soda to the flavorings. I am also going to use my meter to check in the future like tiaE suggests.

This link might help you with the carb count and specific ingredients. From the sounds of your story and the looks of the nutritional information, they just made the drink incorrectly. Which really sucks. It grinds my gears when this happens to me as well.

Hopefully this helps. http://fastfoodnutrition.org/sonic

Thanks curly sarah: I checked the add ins and they run around 10-15 carbs, which would spike me to around 300. I can only imagine where I would have gone if the whole drink had sugar. I see a cherry limeade is 91 carbs. Yikes!