My family and I love to eat at Chick-fil-A. While we will forever miss the Chick-fil-A Cow Calendar (which was sadly ended in 2018) we have enjoyed their new rewards program. This short post is entirely about getting the best value from it.

The rewards program

The Chick-fil-A One rewards program is pretty simple in how it works: You receive points for each dollar spent at Chick-fil-A, which can then be redeemed for a variety of menu items at a latter date. However, I noticed that the number of points required for a few items was not proportional to the item’s menu price.

So, what is the most efficient way to spend my points?

Naturally, I had to know.

Point costs are roughly proportional to dollar values

To answer this question, I manually looked up the number of points required for each menu item and their corresponding menu price at our local Chick-fil-A. Unsurprisingly, it seems that the point cost of an item is largely proportional to the item’s dollar value. There are some interesting deviations from this though: The three salads require disproportionately more points to redeem than the other items.

Waffle fries are king

One thing we can do is look at which items give your points the most purchasing power. In this case, the medium waffle fries are the clear winner coming in at a value of $0.01145 per point redeemed.

Conclusion

Since I always get a spicy chicken sandwich and fries anyway, I’ll now redeem points for the fries instead of the sandwich. Unfortunately, your mileage with this analysis may vary—the results may be different for other locations and if discounts from combos were considered.

It may not seem like much, but if you’re like me, this helps the postdoc dollars go a little further.