If you’ve ever ordered french fries in Utah, there’s a good chance you’ve also been offered fry sauce. The tangy, pink condiment has become so ubiquitous within the state that KUER listener Derek Fossey wanted to know where it all started.
“I thought, why is this just in Utah?” he said while enjoying an order of fries at a Millcreek Arctic Circle location — the Utah restaurant chain also claims to have the “original” fry sauce.
“I've never had this anywhere else I've lived.”
Fossey and his family moved to Utah from Southern California this summer. He said they were quick to adjust to life in the state until one fateful day when they ordered a pizza with a side of fries. The waitress asked if they also wanted fry sauce.
“I assumed she meant ketchup,” he said. “You know, that's kind of what you put on fries. I thought, ‘Oh, that must be a Utah thing.’ Like, on the East Coast, they call marinara sauce ‘gravy.’ I thought here in Utah they called ketchup, fry sauce. But what she brought wasn't ketchup, and it was delicious.”
Fossey and his wife have two young boys, so they eat a lot of french fries. The sauce has become a bit of a family obsession ever since that first experience.
“The other thing I've noticed is that the fry sauce is so different at different places,” he said. “It all has kind of its own little twist to it.”
Fry sauce is, at its core, brilliantly simple. Exact ratios vary depending on location and individual tastes, but it consists of roughly equal parts ketchup and mayonnaise and maybe an extra spice or two that are mixed together until a shade somewhere on the orange-to-pink spectrum is achieved.

It’s almost too simple. There’s no way Utahns were the first people to think of mixing ketchup and mayo, right? As it turns out, likely, Utah was not the birthplace of the condiment.
“Let's be honest, it's not something that was only invented here,” said lifelong Utahn Michael Christensen, who authored an essay all about the state’s obsession with fry sauce for the 2020 book “This is the Plate: Utah Food Traditions.”
“It's been in recipe books back in the 1900s, there's an Argentinian version of the sauce. It's found around the globe with variant ingredients, but Utah has somehow made it its own.”
One of the earliest references to a mayo-ketchup sauce in the United States comes from a New Orleans cookbook published in 1900 that details a recipe for “thousand island dressing,” which consists of half mayo and half ketchup served over a head of lettuce. In Germany, ordering pommes rot-weiss — that’s “red-white fries” in English — will get you fries with mayo and ketchup, although traditionally the sauces are not pre-mixed.
Christensen said when it comes to fry sauce’s origins in Utah, the story is a little murky.
“Some say it was a guy named Don Carlos Edwards in the 40s up north. Some people say it was a burger joint down at Stan's Drive-in in Provo in the 50s,” he said. “You know, they've even got a plaque on the wall down there. Some people say that it was a Burger King somewhere in the middle of Iowa, and a traveling salesman came through and somehow carried this idea and recipe with him until he settled in Utah, and then it became a thing.”
Edwards went on to found the first Arctic Circle restaurant in 1950. And at the time of the fry sauce origin story at Stan’s Drive-in, it was an Arctic Circle franchise, which explains the Utah chain’s claim to the “original” fry sauce.
When it comes to how something as simple as a dipping sauce for french fries can become synonymous with Utah for so many people, Christensen points to a couple of things: It could be Utah’s entrepreneurial spirit of finding new ways to do old things and making them our own. It could also be as simple as the power of nostalgia.
Every burger and fries Christensen remembers having as a kid growing up in Utah came with the condiment.
“I don’t even particularly like fry sauce, but I guarantee you I recognize when I go to a burger joint and I don't have access to it,” he said. “So there's some kind of comfort or security there for me.”

As a new Utahn, Fossey agreed with Christensen’s take.
“I think it helps people kind of create a source of attachment,” he said. “Fry sauce seems to be something that people are pretty passionate about up here.”
So, was fry sauce invented by a guy named Don Carlos in Ogden? A couple of teenagers at a burger joint in Provo? Or a traveling salesman from Iowa?
In the end, Christensen said it doesn’t matter. What matters is that Utahns are talking about it and creating an identity around something as simple as a mix of ketchup and mayo. So if you’ve ever had fry sauce or even heard of it, congrats. You’re in some small way, a Utahn.
It’s an identity that Fossey and his family are happy to share with the rest of the state.
“I would just say that it’s amazing. I love it. It was a hidden surprise, moving to Utah and getting to experience this, and I'm so thankful it's here.”