“Sorry, the ice cream machine is broken.” The dreaded sentence heard in McDonald’s Drive-Thru’s all across the world has become a meme, but seriously: why is it always broken? How come only McDonald’s ice cream machines have this issue? And is the problem really that severe, or is it just an exaggeration?
To start off, the problem is absolutely real. Approximately 12% of McDonald’s ice cream machines are broken at any moment in time, according to the website mcbroken.com. For a machine that has been around for decades, that failure rate is abysmal. Before 2021, the popular theory was that McDonald’s ice cream machines had a long cleaning cycle. They weren’t actually broken but employees just said it was because it was simpler. But after Johnny Harris’s 2021 deep dive into the rumors surrounding the constantly broken ice cream machines, we now have a new perspective on the issue.
In his video, Harris visited other fast food outlets and found that all of their ice cream machines were rarely or never broken. So what exactly causes McDonald’s ice cream machines to constantly malfunction? It turns out that McDonald’s corporate has a deal with Taylor, a business partner going back decades. Taylor is a company that produces ice cream machines for numerous fast food chains. However, it has an exclusive agreement with McDonald’s. Every McDonald’s franchise is required to use one specific Taylor ice cream machine designed for the restaurant. To keep the ice cream safe, the machine is required to run a heat cycle every day. This process is typically done early in the morning while the store is closed. Later, when the store opens its doors, an employee checks the machine. They either see that the heat cycle was successful, or that the heat cycle failed, with some cryptic error code that doesn’t provide any relevant information. In this case, the employee just runs the heat cycle again, with no clue as to what happened. Most of the time, the heat cycle will just fail again, since no one knows what went wrong. At this point, they have no choice. “Just call the guy,” the manager says.
In the 101-page Taylor ice cream machine manual for owners, there are plenty of error codes. But all of them lead to one place: “Call a service technician.” Taylor ice cream machines are only approved to be fixed by certified Taylor technicians. The cost of these technicians is an outrageous 100+ dollars for half an hour. According to a yearly report for Taylor’s financials, the service portion of their business brings in 25% of Taylor’s total revenue. Here lies the problem: Taylor makes large amounts of money off their ice cream machines breaking all the time.
In an open market, firms are constantly incentivized by competition to improve their product. If a firm’s product breaks down all the time, it will be driven out of the market. However, in the Taylor-McDonald’s agreement, the opposite is true: Taylor is incentivized to make its product worse for more service money. In fact, numerous Taylor software updates for their ice cream machines have made machine condition worse, as the only change was the addition of unintelligible error codes. One service technician made a video talking about this issue, and his video was soon taken down. Only service technicians who work on the product understand how it actually works, thus they are the only ones who can call Taylor out for the bad machines. However, they can be easily silenced by their employer. In this way, Taylor has avoided media coverage of their corrupt practices for a long time.
Recently, a major breakthrough has occurred in this sticky situation: Kytch. Kytch had a solution to the cryptic error codes on the McDonald’s ice cream machines, in the form of an attachment that could plug into the machine. Every time the heat cycle failed, the attachment would send a report about why the cycle failed, how to fix it, and how to prevent it from happening again. It was a smash hit, and hundreds of devices were quickly sold. During a conference for McDonald’s franchise owners, the head of the organization of franchise owners openly endorsed the product, explaining that it was really helpful. Soon after this event, McDonald’s corporate sent an email to all of its franchise owners, claiming that Kytch was dangerous and demanding franchise owners either halt use of the product, or have their franchise contracts voided. The truth is clearer than ever: McDonalds and Taylor have a corrupt relationship and will not stop at anything to keep their joint control over the ice cream machine business. This dishonesty hurts the franchise owners, and more importantly, the customers.
In March 2022, Kytch filed a 900 million dollar lawsuit against McDonald’s, claiming that McDonald’s lied about their product to keep its joint monopoly over ice cream machines with Taylor. Even after McDonald’s tried to throw out the lawsuit, a judge allowed it to continue. The case has not reached a verdict, but it could be a huge potential hit to the monopoly that Taylor and McDonalds have held for a long time.