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Picture the scene - its a blazing hot summer day, or, maybe even just late lat night and you are restless..you drive out to a local McDonald's drive through only to be told once again, 'sorry, the machine is down'. In fact that situation didn't happen just to you - it happens many times, to many people all over the country! What does it happen so frequently? What is this Ice Cream machine curse that seems t have such a hold on McDona'd's nationwide? Come join us as we get down o what exactly plagues he golden arches to this day!
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When you get a craving, it can be hard to shake
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And when that craving is itself a shake, there's only one place to go at all hours of the night
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McDonald's. Home of soft-serve ice cream and ice cream sundaes, along with a wide variety of milkshakes and McFlurries
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But what happens when you pull up to that drive-thru intercom only to be told that your cravings can't be satisfied
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And why does this exact situation seem to play itself out almost every single night
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Today, we're getting the scoop on why McDonald's ice cream machines are always broken
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Okay, as the Australians say, it's Mac time again. A 2017 study of posts on X, formerly known as Twitter before that machine went and broke too
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found that the most common complaint users expressed about McDonald's concerned the company's non-functioning ice cream machines
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Even today, over half a decade after that 2017 study, there remains a vibrant meme culture
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on X and other social media sites surrounding the faulty devices. In other words, if it seems like every time you go to McDonald's for ice cream and the
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dang machine is broken, you're not crazy and you're not alone. But even to many McDonald's employees, the whims and inner workings of their ice cream
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machines remain a mystery. Apparently, in order to see what's going on inside
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to see vital stats concerning things like glycol temperature, milk and sugar viscosity
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and even the meanings of specific error codes, a complex sequence of buttons must be pressed
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A sequence that is never disclosed to the restaurants themselves, and that never finds its way into any instruction manuals
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Likewise, convoluted error codes are said to be nearly incomprehensible to the typical user
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And the official user manual hardly helps when trying to decipher what's gone wrong
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which sounds more like a knockoff Tamagotchi your mom bought by mistake
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rather than a piece of commercial equipment. Consequently, franchises have to rely on the availability of approved repair technicians
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to hack into their machines for them. As a result, it's been estimated that anywhere from 10% to 25% of McDonald's ice cream machines
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aren't working at any given moment. Those are Ryan Leaf's stats. What's more, over 60% of all McDonald's desserts rely on the ice cream machine in one way or another
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meaning that without a functioning machine, over half the dessert menu is off the table
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Fan sites have naturally risen up to document exactly which ice cream machines are broken at any given time
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saving ice cream hopefuls unnecessary and unfruitful trips to their local McDonald's
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Most prominently among these, the 2020 website McBroken operates by repeatedly placing ice cream sundae orders
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at various McDonald's locations, and then noting whether the order is accepted
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or if it is marked by the restaurant as currently unavailable. So how did we get here
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And what's really going on behind the scenes? Way back in the 1920s, Charles Taylor
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an ice cream maker from Buffalo, New York, was growing sick and tired of making ice cream It took too long and he was running out of patience So he decided to tinker around And in 1926 he came up with just the thing he was looking for
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He patented the US's first ever soft serve ice cream machine, which would allow him to produce ice cream quickly
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and in large batches. News of his invention quickly spread. And soon, everyone wanted a piece of Taylor's soft serve pie
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Or, uh, how did he divvy up ice cream? Ice cream cake? Presumably capitalizing on that confusion, the Taylor Company, then known as the Taylor Freezer Corporation, soon began selling these machines to restaurants all around the country
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Then in 1940, over a decade later and on the U.S.'s opposite coast, McDonald's opened its first set of doors in San Bernardino, California
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While it's unclear exactly when McDonald's first started selling ice cream and milkshakes, one thing is for sure, sometime in the 1940s, McDonald's acquired their very own Taylor Company machine
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and the fates of the two companies have been tethered together ever since
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In 1954, Ray Kroc, a salesman who at the time was pushing Prince Castle brand
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milkshake-making multi-mixers to restaurants all across America, sold eight of his multi-mixers to the then-sixth-location McDonald's restaurant chain
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According to legend, Kroc became so curious about this high-volume customer that he decided to fly out to San Bernardino to check out their restaurant chain for himself
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He was instantly enraptured by what the McDonald's brothers were up to
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and he soon after acquired the rights to expand their restaurant nationally
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And just two years later, Kroc further cemented McDonald's connection to the Taylor Company
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when he made Taylor the exclusive ice cream machine supplier for his growing corporation
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a relationship that began in 1956 and lasted all the way until 2017
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Over the decades that followed Ray Kroc's partnership with the Taylor Company
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McDonald's released all sorts of new ice cream-based products and flavors. In 1967, for instance, McDonald's franchisee Hal Rosen created the first-ever Shamrock Shake at his Connecticut location
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It was an instant hit, and the Winder Corporation soon took it to test markets all across the U.S
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By the early 1970s, the Shamrock Shake had become an annual St. Patrick's Day staple
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In its 1974, Ron helped to fund the creation of the first-ever Ronald McDonald House
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That same decade, Ice Cream Sundaes first started appearing as well, featured in advertisements that encouraged customers to spoon up a Sunday smile
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Years later, in 1995, New Brunswick franchisee Ron McClellan created one of the company's most popular desserts ever, the McFlurry
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His invention soon spread to locations all over the world, with an initial flavor lineup of Oreo, M&M's, Butterfinger, Heath, and Nestle Crunch
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Since then, the McFlurry has seen a variety of limited time and regionally specific flavors pop up all over the place
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The US alone has had peanut butter crunch, strawberry shortcake, Oreo shamrock
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and who could forget the Shrek-inspired Ogreload, for everyone who's ever wanted a spoon of Shrek's load
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Meanwhile other countries have had flavors all their own as well For instance the UK has the famed Cadbury Cream Egg flavor Japan has its matcha Thailand has a tiramisu flavor
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And South Africa has chocolate lime. Also in the mid-90s, McDonald's tried their hand at the triple-thick shake
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It was pretty much exactly what it sounds like, an extremely thick milkshake
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created by being run through the milkshake machine three times over. If that sounds decadent to the point of misadventure
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you're not far from the truth. One triple-thick shake alone has almost 30 grams of fat. Still
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the triple-thick shake lasted until 2011, when it was discontinued over poor sales
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Most recently, McDonald's tried their hand at the Grimace Shake, a berry-flavor milkshake that
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helped to celebrate their purple character's 52nd birthday. And credit where credit is due
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he's looking pretty good for a middle-aged fast food mascot. The Grimace Shake had its first run
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in the summer of 2023. Gen Z McDonald's fans ran with the idea
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and created an assortment of disturbing TikTok videos, many of which implied that partaking in the promotion
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would summon a vengeful grimace, hell-bent on destroying anyone who drank his milkshake
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While McDonald's acknowledged the trend, they never actually got in on the joke themselves
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allowing the absurdist fan love to play out organically without corporate intervention
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Neither that or they didn't want to give away Grimace's terrible secret. With this huge, constantly changing lineup of ice cream-based desserts
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McDonald's needs their ice cream machines to remain functional. While the Taylor Company supplies their tailor-made ice cream machines to other fast food chains
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including Chick-fil-A, Wendy's, and Dairy Queen, there's a reason the McDonald's machines are uniquely troublesome
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The Taylor Company has a specific ice cream machine that is made exclusively for McDonald's
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meaning that no other company is legally able to have the same C602 model
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Likewise, the only technicians contractually allowed to fix these $18,000 machines are Taylor Company technicians
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meaning you are forbidden from attempting to repair any of these machines yourself
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Not that you'd be able to make much sense of it if you tried. Repairing these costly machines is a substantial part of their business model
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In 2018, the Taylor Company performed an acquisition review, which publicly revealed that 25% of all tailored company revenue came from repair contracts alone
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However, a growing movement has pushed to end such business practices. In 2019, for instance, a third-party startup called Kitch attempted to circumvent the convoluted error messages provided by the C602 model
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By plugging the Kitch device into a McDonald's ice cream machine, error codes can be read with easy-to-understand clarity that tells the user exactly what's gone wrong
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However, after 500 Kitsch devices were sold, McDonald's messaged their franchise locations
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and told them that the use of such devices was not authorized
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arguing that Kitsch devices could both lead to serious injuries and to the leaking of confidential company information
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What kind of secrets are they telling the ice cream? The Taylor company in turn created their own competing Kitsch device which McDonald soon after authorized for in use Kitsch then sued both Taylor and McDonald arguing that the two companies had coordinated to not only box them out
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but to actively steal their intellectual property. However, the presiding judge ultimately threw the case out, claiming there was no evidence that such a theft had occurred
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If you come at the clown, you'd best not miss. In recent years, many have begun to push for right-to-repair laws, which are laws that would
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prevent manufacturers from making themselves the sole repairers of their own machinery
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and that would protect customers' ability to take their broken products to cheaper
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third-party technicians. And in 2021, just months after Kitsch filed its lawsuit against
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Taylor and McDonald's, the Federal Trade Commission began to investigate both companies
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for the recurring issues with their ice cream machines. In other words, they're so out of order that the feds got involved
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While it's unclear whether anything truly illegal is going on behind the scenes
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the federal government is presently trying to get a better understanding of the artificial hurdles manufacturers create
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in order to prevent others from fixing their machines. Such investigations are not necessarily meant to uncover criminal acts
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but rather to gather data that will inform potential forthcoming regulation or legislation. Aside from these right to repair issues that will potentially in the future
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force the Taylor company to change the ways it conducts its business, there's another reason
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their C602 model has more disruptions than other Taylor company machines. These particular models
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are cleaned once every 24 hours, and every cleaning cycle takes a whopping four hours to complete
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If you just so happen to be one of the unlucky customers to come in during that cleaning cycle
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you very well may be told that the ice cream machine is currently broken
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Why? The ice cream machine is always down! What's more, cleaning the C602 model is an 11-part process
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If any step in that process is performed improperly, the machine may provide a convoluted and indecipherable error message at the end of the cycle
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If one of these messages pops up, employees have no choice but to start the 4-hour cleaning cycle all over again
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Plus, if the user doesn't know what went wrong the first time
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they're likely to make the same mistake again, making the machine inoperable for continual four-hour increments
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until someone finally figures it out. Ice cream was never meant to be this complicated
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In 2017, McDonald's finally ended their Taylor Company exclusivity. In the years since, many franchise locations have switched over to ice cream machines from Carpigiani
12:02
Even those come with their own set of downsides, though. Carpigiani is based in Italy, meaning that any needed replacement parts take much longer to
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acquire, and fewer local technicians know how to fix them. Likewise, many franchises still remain
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loyal not only to the Taylor Company, but to the C602 model itself. Of the more than 13,000
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McDonald's locations in the U.S., almost all of them still make use of Taylor Company products
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Hey, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. And if it is broke, try again in four hours
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or maybe go to Dairy Queen
#Food & Drink
#Restaurants
#Fast Food