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Peruse the sauce aisle in any grocery store these days, and you’ll notice the familiar, generic bottles (barbecue, mustard, sad gray relish) displaced by a cavalcade of restaurant-brand fast-food sauces throwing their weight around the shelves. Whether it’s offerings from Arby’s, Taco Bell, Whataburger, Subway, or Chick-fil-A, or the sauces Popeyes released back in March to the delight of Mardi Gras mustard fans everywhere, that condiment you once timidly asked for more of at the drive-thru window is now available by the liter (no, I’m not sure how many packets that takes).

Indeed, your refrigerator door may be beginning to look like a food court, awash in more chain-sauce options than foods to dip in it. You could, if you wanted, marinate that homemade chicken breast in some Popeyes Sweet Heat, or use it to scoop up a dollop of Chick-fil-A Polynesian sauce, or wrap it in a tortilla and douse everything with Taco Bell’s Verde Salsa. Instead of plunging your nuggets into the deepest crevice of a shallow packet to eke out a single sauce molecule, you now have the luxury of ending up with a pool of the stuff on your plate, just waiting to be washed down the drain. Is this some form of ironic punishment in which we’re getting too much of a good thing? Aren’t our beloved sauces—which once drew their allure and mystique from scarcity—at risk of losing their appeal, like a cool food truck going brick-and-mortar?

Before you shrug and write off the great sauce flood as late-capitalist decadence, please recall with me the dark days of rationing. For decades, fast-food sauces were a rare ore available only in small doses no bigger than a Nyquil cup. We complained about never having enough, built up the courage to skip the line and ask for more like a child in a Dickens novel, and watched helplessly as the clerk sighed and took pity on us, bequeathing a couple of sachets into our shaking hands. In the drive-thru, you could always end up with no sauce, the wrong sauce, or an almost insulting amount, like one packet of zesty Buffalo for 27 chicken tenders. Sometimes, though it’s the stuff of legend, a customer recognizes the lack after departing the drive-thru, and boldly careers back around to the window like a maniac, demanding their fair share.

Customers long tried to subvert this scarcity with scheming. At restaurants, we grabbed whatever extra packets we could to save for the next potential skimping, and even fantasized about slipping behind the counter for a sauce heist, never to go dry again. The internet is also rife with homemade copycat recipes attempting to crack the fast-food-sauce Enigma code, but they are never quite right, likely because the ingredients mere mortals can access are too pure of mysterious stabilizers, arcane flavor boosters, and probably added fluoride.

Clearly, in other words, there was demand. And it didn’t emerge out of nowhere. Adam Chandler, the author of Drive-Thru Dreams, traces it back to at least the decade in which Fifty Shades of Grey was the bestselling novel, not that the two are related. “There was a condiment boom in the early 2010s that I think had to do with both the Great Recession and a sudden fascination with hot sauces, led by the sriracha obsession,” he said. “The Recession brought about a sense that innovation and indulgence had to revolve around doing more with less. That meant, instead of major investments in new products, we saw condiments fill the demand for something new that also didn’t require major consumer investment. [And then] at some point in the past decade, fast-food companies started marketing the sauces as the attractions on par with the food they accompanied.

“If there were one ‘canary in the McNugget box’ moment,” he adds, “It had to be the Rick and Morty szechuan sauce riots of 2017, which showed how the sauces we used to leave baking in our glove compartments for years had become bona fide commodities.” It was quite the quick graduation, seeing those packets go from condiment to cultural phenomenon: Rick and Morty fans were promised limited-edition, show-tie-in sample packets of Szechuan Buttermilk Crispy Tender dipping sauce at McDonald’s, but naturally, the locations involved had only a couple dozen on hand. Adorable chaos ensued.

I can’t help but imagine a cartoonlike meeting between franchise owners and sauces, with owners insisting that the sauces are nothing without the food and won’t survive on their own. But they nonetheless broke free. “The fact that fast food was so slow in going into grocery stores is surprising,” says Andrew Smith, the author of Fast Food and Junk Food. “Because they make a lot of money on it. They sell them in stores for three or four times what other sauces are sold for, they get huge visibility, and they don’t lose customers.”

From a business perspective, it’s hard to argue with the move. Fast-food brands spend millions getting their names in front of eyeballs, whether through commercials, sponsorships, or towering billboards, just so we’ll happen to glance at their colorful logo for three seconds before looking away. And now there it is, beaming at you from the upper-gallery seats in the fridge while you’re looking for something to eat at 1 a.m. “You should get some nuggets tomorrow,” the Chick-fil-A honey mustard whispers. “Fuck that,” responds the Taco Bell Diablo bottle, “we’re still open, baby. Come on over now.”

And we do. The fast-food industry has enjoyed unparalleled growth for decades, and now, with bottled missionaries getting the word out in previously unconquered terrain, that brand awareness may reach total omnipotence. But will that necessarily translate into more combos sold?

Seems likely! But I’ll be honest: Nothing has undercut my desire to queue up IRL—not the rising costs, the overt unhealthiness, the chance an order will be completely wrong—more than having a quasi–wine cellar of fast-food sauces in my fridge. Moreover, now that I have an overabundance of sauce, I’m way less interested in the hastily put-together food that normally comes with it.

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If, for instance, I feel like Taco Bell (don’t judge), I sometimes buy the chain’s hot sauce in a grocery store and make my own burrito at home, which tends to taste like a slightly better version of Taco Bell, and totally negates the urge to head to one. This is not to mention that it is obviously fresher, is less expensive, and has no chance of a sauce shortage. It’s the same with Arby’s and Popeyes. The sauce often satisfies the craving for the “brand taste” more than any other element of the food, and is typically the hardest part of the meal to re-create.

Which can’t be an accident. Desperately needing the sauce for your fast-food meal demonstrates that the sauce is doing the heavy lifting, and that without them, most drive-thru sandwiches would be indistinguishable from the paper bag they came in. Yes, I know that “Man Discovers Cooking Is Better Than Fast Food” is no groundbreaking headline. What’s of note, however, is that releasing these sauces in stores could have the unintended side effect of actually encouraging more home cooking.

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Now, don’t get me wrong: At the end of the day, the brands are making their money. But the rapid transition between sauce scarcity and oversaturation really could diminish their appeal over time. “If things are available in the grocery store, they’re not really special anymore,” says Dave Hogan, a professor of history at Heidelberg University, and the author of Selling ’Em by the Sack: White Castle and the Creation of American Food. “Going to a restaurant is an event. … Opening your refrigerator is not an event. Opening your refrigerator is just sustenance.”

For all we know, this rush of free-flowing sauce may backfire and end up resembling what home streaming did to going to the movies. Then again, betting against the fast-food industry is probably a mistake. The urge to eat after work with the least amount of possible effort is undefeated, and it means that the franchised wells from which the tangy elixirs are drawn probably aren’t closing up anytime soon. Even I, a bottled-sauce connoisseur, still find myself relying on the old ways from time to time.

It tends to occur when I’m in a real pickle: having the craving at home and realizing that I’ve run dry. Then I must sadly engage in one of the lowest forms of human endeavor and order fast food for delivery. Special instructions? “Extra sauce, please.”

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