Ice cream machine hackers sue McDonald's
wired.com
wired.com
In other words, the machine has determined it's unsafe to serve the contents (because soft serve needs to be pasteurized at certain intervals), not that it's physically incapable of doing so. Therefore it's "broken".
(Disclaimer: I've never used one of these soft serve machines, just read through manuals and stories about them.)
When I ran frozen daiquiri machines it took a lot of finesse to make it through a busy night. Have to constantly manage the temperatures and levels to a nearly absurd precision while doing the rest of your job as well. But the only parameters you can manipulate are material input and material output, there’s no “freeze it faster” button or “store it colder” dial.
It's always down.
I think there's a pretty strong legal case to be made that these machines are deliberately designed to break down in order to drive repair service revenue for both Taylor and McDonalds at the expense of franchisees. Unfortunately, franchisees seem to be locked up under binding arbitration clauses in their franchise agreements. Luckily for consumers, 3rd party vendors aren't subject to these contracts.
Source?
>It also needs to be said that similar machines provided by Taylor to McDonalds' competitors do not have anywhere close to the amount of downtime that McDonalds' machines have
>I think there's a pretty strong legal case to be made that these machines are deliberately designed to break down in order to drive repair service revenue for both Taylor and McDonalds at the expense of franchisees.
AFAIK mcdonalds machine are also self-cleaning, which makes them more complicated and prone to failure. There's also advantages though (ie. you don't have to rely on a minimum wage worker to adequately clean the machine to prevent food poisoning), so absent some sort of evidence showing intent, it's at least plausible that there isn't some sort of conspiracy to drive up repair costs.
But they're not similar machines. The machines in question are models developed for McDonald's that use internal heat treatment to pasteurize the machine and clean it on a more frequent basis. The intent was to keep the machine running longer than previous models, the opposite of your assertion.
The other models need to be disassembled and cleaned by hand to maintain food safety.
That doesn't dismiss the complexity of the product and the likelihood that breakdowns happen, because obviously they do.
Source: I've done engineering work on the C602. I know how it works.
Employees do clean these machines every day, but because of how it's designed they don't need to do so?
Is this something kind of like: I can change my motor oil every 500 miles my car is driven, but according to the manufacturer I don't need to do so that often?
If it hasn't been run in the last 24 hours, the machine will refuse to dispense ice cream unless you run the process (which takes a few hours).
Non-McDonald's machines work how your imagining: you have to toss the leftover ice cream once it goes bad, disassemble the machine and clean it by hand, then load new ice cream into it.
New machines: There's an active oil filter in the car that needs to be turned on every 500 miles. The oil and filter need to be replaced every 5000.
The filtering can be done overnight in your garage while you sleep, but if you don't do it before 500 miles the car will shut down until you do.
Maybe on paper, but having worked in jobs that required the routine cleaning of things, I can state with certainty that said things were often either 1) not actually cleaned or 2) not properly cleaned.
Unlike the fryers and grills the soft-serve machine is filled with dairy product, loaded by hand via human interaction, and just hovering underneath the safe zone temperature-wise.
The former is just the normal sort of shit that a franchise has to deal with, the latter is what a lot of people, myself included thought this issue was... But I've turned my thinking around on this.
After watching the videos on how these machines work, and all the hidden menus within hidden menus with self-sabotaging software/hardware....
Admitting you have dev'ed on this is plainly disgusting. As a fellow engineer, we need to put our foot down and not work for places that institute such unethical and/or illegal behaviors. The faster companies are starved out for *trying* to institute unethical computing, the better.
Wouldn't that mean, though, that the Kytch device could be working around the issue in detriment of the patron's, or "end user", safety?
The franchisees certainly were very happy with Kytch's reduction in their maintenance and downtime cost, caused by very temperamental, ill-designed machines. Franchisee's are clearly victims of a tightly controlled McD ecosystem (sounds so Apple...). But if the machine is operating in a way that could harm users, even if harmful workarounds is just 1 or 2 out of 30 other harmless issues Kytch monitors, fixes or clarifies, still, it would absolutely justify the take down!
Imagine a batch of people who suddenly get a bacteria from unpasteurized ice cream from a Kytch-hacked McD machine. How could McD justify knowing their franchisee's were installing a device that could put their patrons in risk of eating a spoiled dairy products? It's a backdoor for a health crisis, a PR nightmare and endless lawsuits. Even if it doesn't know for sure the device can be blamed, the liability is there.
The machine produces food that goes into people's bodies. Ie, if it were to produce a poisonous glycol ice-cream (glycol one of the pasteurization ingredients) all of a sudden, even if it has nothing to do with what Kytch is intended to do, could you really 100% discard in front of a judge that a glitch or a hack in the Kytch's linux computer, which is btw connected to the internet, didn't order the ice-cream machine to do that which, as a consequence, killed a hypothetical 5-year old kid from food poisoning?
Imagine McD is now Boeing and the Kytch box is something airlines found that make 737-MAX fly safer by plugging into and overriding the system codes so that it can warn pilots of possible 737-MAX issues... Does it make sense for Boeing to allow such thing even if it makes planes safer?
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/they-hacked-mcdonalds-ice-cream-...
Case in point, when someone mods their car it is not somehow the manufacturer's responsibility for a crash. It fails the pre-hearing test of "can we even have a lawsuit about this" if someone even tries to bring it up.
I fear I am being overly pedantic here, but to me, "override" implies that the device is circumventing sensor readings or physical interlocks or something similar to manipulate the machine's mechanisms to doing something they weren't intended to. However, I've see no indication of that. The device is described as, essentially, a second control panel. Anything the Kytch device can do is something an operator could already do by pushing buttons on the factory-installed control panel. The difference is that it interprets the data to be easier to understand, and provides remote monitoring.
It's really no different than plugging a ScanGauge into a car's ODB-II port. The ScanGauge can tell you all sorts of things about the state of the engine, but it isn't going to stop the brakes from working.
I remember reading that Wired article when it first came out. Near the beginning, it says:
> As O'Sullivan says, this menu isn’t documented in any owner's manual for the Taylor digital ice cream machines
This is demonstrably false. It's clearly documented on page 22 of the service manual: https://static-pt.com/modelManual/TAF-C602_spm.pdf
Frankly, the manuals Taylor has made for these machines are quite thorough and well written. The claims from the article about how this is "secret" and "undisclosed" seem disingenuous when a simple Google search reveals evidence to the contrary. I suppose one could argue that a "service manual" is not an "owner's manual", but that seems overly pedantic (even to me!).
I can't find it from Taylor, though. I think the point they're making with the "secret" is that the manufacturer won't give them to you. The 3rd party copies are likely illegal; I would presume the service manual is copyrighted.
> Anything the Kytch device can do is something an operator could already do by pushing buttons on the factory-installed control panel. The difference is that it interprets the data to be easier to understand, and provides remote monitoring.
It does allow access to things that users weren't meant to be able to access, and some of them are dangerous. E.g. you can change the temperature of the boil cycle down to something too low to kill bacteria.
> It's really no different than plugging a ScanGauge into a car's ODB-II port. The ScanGauge can tell you all sorts of things about the state of the engine, but it isn't going to stop the brakes from working.
The ScanGauge can't actually change any parameters, afaik. This is closer to replacing the ECU. It gives you more data on what you car is doing, but also gives you the option to tune the engine. You can either make it more efficient, or you can destroy the engine, depending on how you tune the settings. Except in this case, "destroy the engine" roughly translates to "give a bunch of people listeria infections".
In my opinion, it's unreasonable for McDonald's to block off access to the data, but it is reasonable for them to not want franchisee's to be able to change parameters like the boil temperature, or how frequently cleanings need to be done (which is another parameter in that secret menu). The whole situation is a mess, because I can't see a way to allow access to the data without access to the whole secret menu, other than replacing all the hardware. I think I saw McDonald's trying to sell their own device on that front; likely because then they can ensure that the parameters aren't exposed.
The C602 was released in 2003 afaict. I don't think this was a malicious decision so much as no one in 2003 predicting that it would be beneficial (or cost-effective) to have a WiFi/Bluetooth remote data port. That was 4 years before the iPhone, and interestingly, also only 5 years after the first consumer bluetooth device was unveiled. I don't find it shocking that a behemoth like McDonald's isn't putting nascent technology in an ice cream machine they plan to use for decades.
From what I understand the issue the Kytch device solves is the cryptic error code displayed by the machines. It tells the user what is wrong and how to fix it, which may just be restarting the machines heating cycle with the correct amount of liquid.
> a PR nightmare and endless lawsuits.
Not that McDonalds would have any issues managing actual health problems, just set the same people on it like they did in the McCoffee case and they can spin the families of a few dozen deadly ill children trying to pay hospital bills into a group of hypochondriacs trying to make billions.
The machines tanks and shaving cores must be disassembled and cleaned every two weeks. They have a very intelligent series of sensors and internal mechanisms that make it impossible to defeat or cheat.
This is not a low skilled job. I'd say it would be easier to change your cars oil than complete this. There's multiple gaskets and seals which need to be rotated quarterly in a tune up kit. While we were hiring at minimum wage the shake machine trained people were making 15$. I can only imagine what they're making now.
I don't find the "cryptic messages" issue to be valid. New machines had new systems and codes, it wasn't malicious. Everyone had access to the manual and the Taylor provider in my region did some phone troubleshooting free of charge to prevent service calls. They even did free annual trainings.
Mechanically older machines can have issues, and some franchisees can be stubborn about replacing them. However I believe the vast majority of the time the issue is the machine not being cleaned.
Do you sell 1 milkshake or 100 a day? Doesn't matter, the tank holds the mix and freezes it on the fly. Taylor machines can output hundreds of units an hour. Or none.
It's always "fresh", there's waste when you clean the machine but other than that the ice cream you get has only been frozen seconds before being served.
It's highly profitable, when the machine is operating correctly the base food cost is much lower than the other food categories(sandwiches and chicken) but not as good as soda and cookies.
A lot of people would find the disassembly and correct reassembly difficult. And there are huge incentives to just not do it.
Genuine question: Mom-and-pop shops used to somehow keep their frozen yogurt machines running with part-time teenager labor. What does this particular machine do that makes it so complicated?
Is it complicated merely for the sake of "job security" on behalf of the ice cream machine vendor?
While teenagers generally have low experience, some of them are have the ability to perform at a level above low skill and are able to follow complex instructions. Look at any of them in more advanced classes who are performing academics at a level beyond what would qualify as low skill. These could've been the teenager running the machines at those mom and pop shops of yesteryear.
It does lead me to question where are they working now and why not at McDonald's. Given a moment of thought I've already generated a number of hypothesis that might explain it, but I'm too lacking in relevant data to narrow them down.
My politics have always aligned with something far more left wing than the Democrats. Pro-private unions, pro m4a, pro welfare assistance, higher minimum wages, I wish people had guaranteed sick and vacation time, better work safety protections, better paternity/maternity leave. And a culture that saw jobs that didn't take a degree as something that could still be worked with a since of dignity.
But in my actual experience working... I worked just about anything you can think of.. Starbucks, Applebee's, TGIFridays,a BBQ restaurant, Sallie Beauty Supply, CVS, Rite-Aid, CompUSA, video rentals, grocery stores, I worked construction, painted, did lots of odd jobs.
And the types of people I met along the way.... The adults in restaurants, pharmacies and retail stores.. who eclipsed me in years anyways, to be frank, were losers.
Lazy, shiftless people who had to be told, constantly, to do the basics even when you had entire days when there was little customizer traffic or stock to take care of
People who would openly lie about "oh my back" and sit on a stool not doing shit all day, then go off to party at night.
People who wouldn't see a customer for hours and couldn't be fucked to "front and face" or do some basic cleaning of the store without being told to.. At 40, 50, 55 years old.
I can't tell you how many people at various jobs who got arrested bc they were jacking shit from the store and selling hit items. I worked a toy store in a mall during the Xmas season once and the manager was cleaning the inventory out by 30% and flipping it every week.
These were always people with kids before they were 18, or had multiple kids from multiple partners, drug use was way more open and regular than anything you see in the office.
You go to McDonald's and you see more tattoos and "grills" than you see any sense.
Do you think they give af about an ice cream machine?
But the bigger question, is why in 2022 is anyone still buying toxic crap from fast food restaurants?
Buy a bag of beans, live a couple years longer.
because i’m sad and it’s easy, tastes good, and is fast
> live a couple years longer
not appealing
Let's get the FTC on this, afaik it's illegal to advertise a product you have no intention of actually serving. eg: used car dealers used to do this with an "amazing deal car", which often never existed. People would come down and get enticed to a diff model at a high price.
edit: The "whoops it's unplugged" was a joke about absurd root causes, but also intended to imply equivalently poor attempts to keep the machine working. That is I do not think they literally did not plug it in, but I do think they are not trying very hard to keep the machine up and running. Other threads point out that the real root may actually be that the original creator of the machines made a complex/crap machine and the cost of technicians makes it unprofitable to bother
So every McDonald's has an ice cream machine as a more sort of "break glass in case of emergency" situation. Or in this case "in case of DQ". But if there is no DQ in the area, why operate the machine? Just have it be "broken". It's not like people have an option they didn't have before.
Why operate the grill or fryer? To sell food and make money. Instead of selling someone a meal for $7 McDonalds can sell them a meal + a mcflurry for $10. Why wouldn't they want to do this?
It doesn't make any sense that a bunch of franchise owners are all in together on some kind of ice cream conspiracy. Surely the truth is less interesting, it's most likely just a boring cost/benefit analysis. There seems to be some flaw with the machines they use that make them particularly prone to breaking down and difficult to maintain. So some stores that don't sell a lot of ice cream anyway decide it's not worth the cost of keeping them running, while other stores that sell more do keep them running.
And surely it's no coincidence that the markets where people buy more ice cream are also where Dairy Queen stores are more likely to open up.
you're assuming the consumer has a marginal $3 to spend and wouldnt instead spend $7 on a (burger + mcflurry) vs (Burger, fries, soft drink). I would guess that the latter has a much higher margin. So for the same $7 spend you can make more profit if your icecream machine is down.
But, if DQ can do the deal for $7 then foot traffic may move to DQ, meaning McD's loses _both_ profitable options. So, the game is to dissuade the market from the preferred package (burger + icecream) towards the more profitable package (burger , fries, softdrink) .
I'd also add that they probably know that the marginal cost of driving to 2 locations means they're just gonna get what they can at 1 stop. That is few people would buy the burger at mcdonald's and then drive to DQ for the mcBlizzard.
Kinda feels like playing roller coaster tycoon all over again.
And I agree with you, it's likely got a way more pedestrian and human answer. The machines require some amount of maintenance or repair that is simply annoying. And eventually, people prefer to not be annoyed. So maybe one day, you just let the ice cream machine be broken instead of doing the annoying thing. Even if the store sells ice cream like gangbusters. The guy slinging cones for minimum wage isn't seeing a single cent difference if he sells 1 or 1000.
Personally, I don't think that holds water. Everyone involved in this drama wants ice cream in the stores. It's not like McDonalds corporate has some Jobsian disgust towards putting ice cream and a burger in the same meal or anything. The far easier explanation is that McDonalds paid Taylor for a custom machine that's extremely temperamental, not that they secretly want to ban their own product because it's ice cream.
It's a cost problem.
Even one service call per month is a significant cost to a low-margin business like a quick-serve restaurant.
It is quite possible there is some hinky corporate politics and such within McDonalds corporate that is preventing improvement here.
Franchisees in general don't wear the pants in this relationship. If McD corporate says you use this machine, tough shit, you use that machine. I'm sure the feelings of franchisees are broadly speaking "taken into consideration" but it's not like there's a union here, the dynamic here is that franchisees will shut their mouths and go make some money for daddy.
It's a weird arms-length model that has run into some trouble before, particularly surrounding labor law, as McD corporate has some very detailed expectations on how franchisees will hire, fire, pay, and operate their employees.
Anyway basically if McDonald's says "you will take those things out of our machine" yeah, franchisees are absolutely going to hop to it. tbh if McDonald's were smart they'd just have done it without the "ackshually this thing will steal your girlfriend, poison your customers, and kill your dog" defamation, because if they'd simply said "we're terminating our business relationship with Kytch, have it removed in the next 2 weeks" franchisees absolutely would have done it anyway. Now they are fighting a lawsuit about it because they just had to get a dig in.
But anyway, corporate wears the pants is the dynamic. It's a very very tightly managed and top-down "franchise".
But if 13% of restaurants have the ice cream machine non-functional at any given time, that means half or more of them are having the problem at some time in the last month.
If you're going to ignore a problem at that scale... well, that's just terrible.
Even if McDonalds had been more reserved, however; Kytch still has some industrial-espionage claims that might go somewhere.
Also, for those wondering exactly how controlled McDonalds' franchise relations are: McDonalds franchisees are required to rent their locations from McDonalds, because McDonalds front-runs their business partners and buys the most valuable land[0] from under them. Literally nothing about the business of being a McDonalds franchisee works the way capitalism or business ownership is "supposed" to work[1]. It's more like paying to work at a somewhat-lucrative job than actually owning a business. McDonalds is a richest-of-the-rich company that sells business opportunities to the poorest-of-the-rich crowd[2], who are looking for a way to park lots of wealth[3] in a safe asset.
[0] Typically, land immediately next to US Interstate off-ramps or equivalently high-traffic highways
[1] Unless you're a left-winger, in which case the McDonalds "strip our business partners of capital interest in the store" policy is how capitalism is "supposed" to work, and treating your business partners as equals is a historical aberration.
For the record I do find the left-wing critique of capitalism to be at least somewhat grounded in current business reality.
[2] Menial labors of the capitalist class. If you define "poor, middle-class, and rich" based on how people make their money (poor: unskilled labor, middle-class: skilled labor, rich: capitalism), then you can recursively subdivide that grouping further, with richest-of-the-rich being people whose wealth comes from owning other businesses through some means (usually trademark or copyright).
[3] McDonalds wants their franchisees to hold at least $750,000 of liquid capital and be able to invest between $1,000,000 and $2,200,000 into their stores.
It is all in the name of "quality" or more truthfully "consistency".
Even so, unless you're a relatively small regional chain, you'd think that having at least two different equipment suppliers would help corporate drive down costs for the franchisees, and thereby make more profit for themselves.
That's what is so strange about this entire situation. McD corporate historically has been laser-focused on profit, which they get through scale (volume) and efficiency. I don't see how there aren't some people in corporate getting fired for this. If the ice cream machines work, they franchisees sell more product. This generates more revenue (and profit) selling the restaurants more ice cream mixture, as well as increasing profits for the restaurants themselves. Which also generates more profits for corporate too. Because of course corporate double-dips.
Money being left on the table... that doesn't sound like McDonalds.
While not quite as deliberate an action as (great?) grandparent was suggesting, I could see the possibility existing where fixing the machines is too much hassle until a competitor opens and they begin having a noticeable impact on customer retention, increasing the expected ROI on fixing the machine enough for management/owner to take action.
ie: if i want icecream i can get it at macdonalds, instead if DQ, unless the machines are broken. if DQ gains significant market share they "fix" the machines and DQ loses its market share.
not saying this is fact. just fleshing out parents
So people start wondering my McDonald's is so plagued by machines that seem to only work on the third Thursday following the fifth month after the Lunar eclipse.
But it's likely a combination of disinterested staff and machines that require more involved maintenance.
Not to mention, there's several points of failure. Not only can various parts of the machine break; the drum that spins the mix, the compressor to keep the mix cold, leaks in various hoses and lines, but you can simply run out of mix.
I'm also thinking about how McDonald's anticompetitive behavior may have an unintended anti-obesity effect.
Again, I'm thinking how awesome the snicker blizzard is.
At least somebody can actually get that deal now, so it's better I guess.
Sure, if its just one they have to identify it and say something like “1 at this price” but that also tells you up front what the deal is.
IMO this is actually the point being made. There's no need to run a loss leader if the competition doesn't exist.
2. Regardless of whether it's a loss leader, I doubt the marginal cost of the ice cream is more than the $1 or whatever the discounted price is. They paid for the expensive ice cream machine and the counter space. They might as well use it.
This is why the franchisee has little incentive to keep them functioning until there's a competitor next door? I don't know if it has to even do with the whole Kryst debaucle
This could have easily been a 5 minute video. Also, it does not offer any explanation why McDonalds is the only customer of the Taylor brand machines with this issue. Burger King is also “an old company”, why doesn’t it apply to them?
These ice cream machines are the printer cartridges of McDonald's. Pointless DRM and obfuscation designed to maximize authorized call outs (with associated costs). Now you can argue taht McDonalds gets a cut of that (which may or may not be true; I just don't know) but all of this comes at the cost of customer experience and brand perception, which are two things McDonald's very much does care about. That's why I'm surprised they've let this go on for so long.
I really have trouble believing the board is unaware of this issue and have chosen not to resolve it.
So McDonald's was betting on the labor savings offsetting the costs of the newer, more complicated and less reliable machines. Overall that may be working out on paper, but the perception of soft-serve being "always broken" is something I am surprised that McDonald's tolerates.
It sounds like Kytch wants to be a legal thorn in McDonald's side until they are paid off. How can a startup afford this? Do they work out some agreement with lawyers to only pay when they win?
The hope is to threaten McDonalds for a billion dollars (pinky) and get a settlement for a few million out of court and wrap things up quietly.
Happens more often than you'd like.
Seems justified to me though. Maybe not legally, but I would too be motivated to annoy McDonalds in their situation.
On a case like this it's probably even more sophisticated than that; they probably ran a process where many law firms pitched to represent them and competed on their contingency fees.
This is strange. Another comment mentioned how the existence of these broken ice-cream machines is anti-competitive towards businesses like Dairy Queen. Does this explain why the machines are always broken? Taylor gets repair contracts that are worth less than the business McDonalds would lose to Dairy Queen?
Which is why I think it has more to do with competition, and that there is no kickback. In that scenario, the incentive to McDonalds is that they can have more franchises that are successful, which means more money flowing back into the corporation. I imagine this gain would be higher than any kickback they could receive from Taylor.
EDIT>> I just realized that the competition scenario might not make any sense. Taylor wants service contracts. McDonalds wants the ability to make ice cream, and ideally have the machines work. The only way McDonalds is incentivized to not have the machines work is if there is either some leverage that Taylor has over McDonalds or if there is a kickback.
General franchisee revenue goes in a big bucket allocated across the entire corporation. A specific kickback might be going into one guy's pocket... If that one guy has sufficient political clout within the corporation, it could cause the present situation.
That's also super illegal, eg. https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndca/pr/former-netflix-executiv...
Another thing companies seem to be doing a lot is false advertising. 7-11 is so bad with this. Sales posted everywhere but when you try and buy them 'it's not in the system sorry it will be regular price.'
Or even worse they list the (sale) price if you buy 2 or more, but do not list the regular single price anywhere.
I'm so tired of companies running our country.
...are you proposing that the government run everything? You might be a bit disappointed with what you receive in that scenario. Choice is powerful.
New emails released in the McDonald’s ice cream machine lawsuit - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29325507 - Nov 2021 (138 comments)
McDonald’s unreliable ice cream machines reportedly under FTC investigation - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28407525 - Sept 2021 (41 comments)
The Feds Want to Know What the McFuck Is Going on with the McFlurry Machines - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28386567 - Sept 2021 (151 comments)
The McFlurry Machine Company Just Got Hit with a McRestraining Order - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28119447 - Aug 2021 (3 comments)
Why the McFlurry machine company just got hit with a restraining order - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28117164 - Aug 2021 (67 comments)
Investigating why McDonald's ice cream machines are often broken [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26936774 - April 2021 (234 comments)
The Reason McDonalds Ice Cream Machines Are Always Broken - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26932344 - April 2021 (3 comments)
ArsTechnica has retracted the story about McDonald's Icecream - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26918415 - April 2021 (8 comments)
They Hacked McDonald’s Ice Cream Machines–and Started a Cold War - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26874436 - April 2021 (4 comments)
I reverse engineered McDonalds’ internal API - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24861623 - Oct 2020 (420 comments)
You're always on the ball dang!
Eventually I want to build software to support these 'related' lists so people can add links to them collaboratively.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26936774
And of course the McBroken website: https://mcbroken.com/
An actual pivot would be finding a different niche market for the device or tweaking the device to serve the same market differently. Find an industrial machine to attach it to and use your notification system to provides alerts and reminders about its maintenance.
I guess it’s not up to us to define what an “actual” pivot can look like. Certainly switching to a legal strategy is in fact a pivot from product development and traction metrics.
This new strategy doesn’t seem crazy to me, having tried to launch a business myself. I agree it’s a moon-shot, but again, it’s plausible that they do have a leg to stand on here due to the history of problems these machines have.
* edit BTW, I’d speculate wildly that there’s a very good chance Kytch was fully aware of the legal dangers of their plan, and went into the product development phase with eyes wide open in the first place. In addition to their plausible chances for success here, it’s also plausible that this legal fight was the expected outcome of their plan, and part of its design, long before it happened.
Sometimes you pivot out. This looks like a pivot to litigation.
This is bad for the consumer and for society.
Many of the startups have made a lot of their money by arbitraging regulation and safety (see Uber , AirBnB, Tesla self driving).
McDonalds is a company that literally serves billions of people. If there is any food borne illness, it can literally kill people and it will be front page news all over. As such, McDonalds keeps a very tight lid on what franchisees are allowed to do.
Installing an unauthorized addition to a very safety critical equipment (soft serve can easily harbor very nasty bacteria) which potentially enables people to do unauthorized diagnosis and work on machines they may or may not understand is a recipe for disaster at McDonalds’ scale.
Is this a cool device? Yes. Should you install a hack on something that can make thousands of people very sick? Probably not.
This device just told the user what was actually wrong with the machine so they could choose to correct it, or call the technician to actually repair it. I don't think there was any indication that the franchises were tearing the machines apart to replace broken parts.
Simply providing a please manually discard product, clean and restart machine due to pasteurization failure code and procedure would have probably avoided the whole fiasco.
Which from the sounds of it, is basically what the "improved" machines do, they aren't improved in any way except to report the failures to the user, and provide appropriate user level remedies.
Sounds like business as usually.
Doing this with their enthusiastic co-operation has to be the best path. Doing it in the face of an antagonistic relationship is really risky.
What a messy story...