They Hacked McDonald’s Ice Cream Machines—and Started a Cold War

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They Hacked McDonald’s Ice Cream Machines—and Started a Cold War

Post by vnatale » Mon May 17, 2021 10:24 pm

https://www.wired.com/story/they-hacked ... Zjo5BoGOkA


They Hacked McDonald’s Ice Cream Machines—and Started a Cold War


Secret codes. Legal threats. Betrayal. How one couple built a device to fix McDonald’s notoriously broken soft-serve machines—and how the fast-food giant froze them out.



OF ALL THE mysteries and injustices of the McDonald’s ice cream machine, the one that Jeremy O’Sullivan insists you understand first is its secret passcode.

Press the cone icon on the screen of the Taylor C602 digital ice cream machine, he explains, then tap the buttons that show a snowflake and a milkshake to set the digits on the screen to 5, then 2, then 3, then 1. After that precise series of no fewer than 16 button presses, a menu magically unlocks. Only with this cheat code can you access the machine’s vital signs: everything from the viscosity setting for its milk and sugar ingredients to the temperature of the glycol flowing through its heating element to the meanings of its many sphinxlike error messages.

“No one at McDonald’s or Taylor will explain why there’s a secret, undisclosed menu," O’Sullivan wrote in one of the first, cryptic text messages I received from him earlier this year.

As O’Sullivan says, this menu isn’t documented in any owner’s manual for the Taylor digital ice cream machines that are standard equipment in more than 13,000 McDonald’s restaurants across the US and tens of thousands more worldwide. And this opaque user-unfriendliness is far from the only problem with the machines, which have gained a reputation for being absurdly fickle and fragile. Thanks to a multitude of questionable engineering decisions, they’re so often out of order in McDonald’s restaurants around the world that they’ve become a full-blown social media meme. (Take a moment now to search Twitter for “broken McDonald’s ice cream machine” and witness thousands of voices crying out in despair.)

But after years of studying this complex machine and its many ways of failing, O’Sullivan remains most outraged at this notion: That the food-equipment giant Taylor sells the McFlurry-squirting devices to McDonald’s restaurant owners for about $18,000 each, and yet it keeps the machines’ inner workings secret from them. What's more, Taylor maintains a network of approved distributors that charge franchisees thousands of dollars a year for pricey maintenance contracts, with technicians on call to come and tap that secret passcode into the devices sitting on their counters.

The secret menu reveals a business model that goes beyond a right-to-repair issue, O’Sullivan argues. It represents, as he describes it, nothing short of a milkshake shakedown: Sell franchisees a complicated and fragile machine. Prevent them from figuring out why it constantly breaks. Take a cut of the distributors’ profit from the repairs. “It’s a huge money maker to have a customer that’s purposefully, intentionally blind and unable to make very fundamental changes to their own equipment,” O’Sullivan says. And McDonald’s presides over all of it, he says, insisting on loyalty to its longtime supplier. (Resist the McDonald’s monarchy on decisions like equipment, and the corporation can end a restaurant’s lease on the literal ground beneath it, which McDonald's owns under its franchise agreement.)



THE STANDARD TAYLOR digital ice cream machine in a McDonald’s kitchen is “like an Italian sports car,” as one pseudonymous franchisee who uses the Twitter nom de guerre McD Truth described it to me.

When the hundreds of highly engineered components in Taylor’s C602 are working in concert, the machine’s performance is a smooth display of efficiency and power. Like other ice cream machines, it takes in liquid ingredients through a hopper and then freezes them in a spinning barrel, pulling tiny sheets of the frozen mixture off the surface of the barrel’s cold metal with scraper blades, mixing it repeatedly to create the smallest possible ice crystals, and then pushing it through a nozzle into an awaiting cup or cone.

But what makes the machine special is that it has two hoppers and two barrels, each working independently with precise settings, to produce both milkshakes and soft serve simultaneously. It uses a pump, rather than gravity like many other machines, to accelerate the flow of McFlurries and fudge sundaes: McD Truth describes selling 10 ice cream cones a minute during peak sales periods, a feat that’s impossible with other machines.

ice cream machine
Taylor’s notoriously finicky and fragile ice cream machines are used by practically every major fast-food chain, including most of McDonald’s 13,000-plus US restaurants and tens of thousands more internationally. PHOTOGRAPH: GABRIELA HASBUN
And while other ice cream machines have to be disassembled and cleaned daily—and any leftover contents discarded—McDonald’s Taylor machines use a daily “heat treatment” process designed to jack up their contents’ temperature to 151 degrees Fahrenheit, pasteurize them for a minimum of 30 minutes, and then refreeze them again in a once-a-night cycle, a modern marvel of hygiene and cost savings.

But in keeping with McD Truth’s Italian sports car analogy, these machines are also temperamental, fragile, and ridiculously overengineered. “They work great as long as everything is 100 percent perfect,” McD Truth writes. “If something isn’t 100 percent, it will cause the machine to fail.” (McDonald’s agreement with franchisees also allows them to use an actual Italian machine, sold by Bologna-based Carpigiani, that McD Truth describes as much better designed. But given that its replacement parts can take a week to arrive from Italy, far fewer restaurants buy it.)

Every two weeks, all of Taylor's precisely engineered components have to be disassembled and sanitized. Some pieces have to be carefully lubricated. The machine’s parts include no fewer than two dozen rubber and plastic O-rings of different sizes. Leave a single one out, and the pump can fail or liquid ingredients can leak out of the machine. The tech manager for one McDonald’s franchisee told me he has reassembled Taylor’s ice cream machines more than a hundred times, and had them work on the first try at most 10 of those times. “They’re very, very, very finicky,” he says.
Above provided by: Vinny, who always says: "I only regret that I have but one lap to give to my cats." AND "I'm a more-is-more person."
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I Shrugged
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Re: They Hacked McDonald’s Ice Cream Machines—and Started a Cold War

Post by I Shrugged » Tue May 18, 2021 9:40 am

Nothing frosts me more than to work my way up to the drive in order spot at McD's and have their milkshake machine be out of order. They need to have a sign in the parking lot. Or out by the street. Like the old (No) Vacancy signs at motels. (No) Ice Cream.

I have big problems in life.
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Xan
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Re: They Hacked McDonald’s Ice Cream Machines—and Started a Cold War

Post by Xan » Tue May 18, 2021 11:14 am

I Shrugged wrote:
Tue May 18, 2021 9:40 am
Nothing frosts me more than to work my way up to the drive in order spot at McD's and have their milkshake machine be out of order. They need to have a sign in the parking lot. Or out by the street. Like the old (No) Vacancy signs at motels. (No) Ice Cream.

I have big problems in life.
Here you go:
https://mcbroken.com/
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I Shrugged
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Re: They Hacked McDonald’s Ice Cream Machines—and Started a Cold War

Post by I Shrugged » Tue May 18, 2021 2:21 pm

Xan wrote:
Tue May 18, 2021 11:14 am
I Shrugged wrote:
Tue May 18, 2021 9:40 am
Nothing frosts me more than to work my way up to the drive in order spot at McD's and have their milkshake machine be out of order. They need to have a sign in the parking lot. Or out by the street. Like the old (No) Vacancy signs at motels. (No) Ice Cream.

I have big problems in life.
Here you go:
https://mcbroken.com/
LOL! That is great. Looks like my local one is up.
Gotta run....
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