We Didn't Expect To Find This Ingredient In Wendy's Cheese Sauce

If you're a fan of Wendy's, you're well acquainted with the chain's cheese sauce. This warm, gooey topping is served on numerous side dishes, including several varieties of fries and baked potatoes. Basically, if your item comes with a messy layer of melted dairy, it's likely this addition.

The cheddar cheese sauce is made with some obvious ingredients like water, the cheddar cheese, and other dairy products. However, there's one element we definitely weren't expecting to find in it — tomato concentrate.

Tomato concentrate is just as it sounds: tomatoes that are cooked down to extract moisture. Tomato paste is also a type of concentrate, and while we're all familiar with the thick, red paste, we wouldn't expect it in a cheese sauce. When biting into Wendy's cheese fries, we don't pick up on a tomato flavor. And when making homemade cheese sauce, we've never added tomato concentrate. So, what's a tomato product doing in Wendy's cheese sauce?

Wendy's doesn't explicitly share why tomato concentrate is in its cheese sauce, so we can only speculate. However, one logical reason would be to enhance consistency. People use tomato paste rather than sauce to enhance the viscosity of dishes. Since concentrate typically has a thicker texture, it may give the cheese sauce more substance. After all, the topping must strike that perfect balance between soft and structured. You want it gooey but not so much that it's dripping off your fries.

Tomatoes are also an umami-rich food. They have that savory flavor you get from glutamates, which makes you feel satisfied yet crave more. And since tomato concentrate is cooked down, it packs even more umami flavor into a small amount. Tomatoes are also acidic, which can balance out the creaminess of the cheese. This is why tomato paste makes an excellent addition to grilled cheese sandwiches.

Color is another factor to consider. Cheddar is naturally a light creamy yellow. To obtain that darker orange hue, an artificial or natural coloring is added. Annato is already listed as a color additive in Wendy's cheddar cheese sauce, but perhaps the mixture called for a little red to enrich that bright yellow-orange. Since tomato products can be used instead of synthetic dyes, they make sense as a color enhancement.