The REAL Reason McDonalds Ice Cream Machines Are Always Broken

Have you heard the conspiracy about McDonald's about their ice

cream

? Well, I've been digging into something for a long time, probably deeper than any other video for a while, at least something I never thought I'd be digging into, but I am. I'm researching McDonald's ice

cream

machines

. Who wants to go buy ice cream? Can I get an ice cream cone? We don't have ice cream at the moment. Not today. Not today. Maybe tomorrow or something or next week. I don't know. Does that happen? very much like that the machine is out of order, yes, yes, okay, for a few years now people have noticed that the ice cream

machines

at McDonald's

always

seem to be down.

The ice cream machine part doesn't work. Broken ice cream machines at McDonald's have been fodder. For a lot of weird internet culture, one guy even made an interactive map showing every McDonald's that has a

broken

ice cream machine right now, so I reverse engineered the Android app. I think it was like it was a meme, but no one knew. whether this meme was correct or not, but they didn't know it was a

real

thing that all franchises are struggling with, but a couple of months ago I got an email from a guy who said he had a deeper story. that there are important questions that no one is asking and he promised me answers to those questions and data and evidence to back them up, he even said that there is potentially something nefarious going on here.

I was like, okay, cool, another conspiracy theory about these McDonald's ice creams. creators, so I asked my producer Jack to get on the phone with this guy and listen to him a week later, Jack called me and there's actually something going on here. I've been going through everything and you

real

ly need to see this. Well, it still was. I'm very skeptical that this could be anything worth a video or investigation, but I decided to dive in anyway and see this evidence for myself. I started digging through McDonald's internal emails for data on these mind-numbing 100-page instruction manuals for ice cream makers.

I started to talk. to McDonald's franchise owners and managers and yes, it turns out there's something really strange going on here, something that hasn't been reported on before and something that shows that McDonald's

broken

ice cream machines actually reveal a larger story about how big companies protect each other. Even if it means hurting your customers, I never thought I'd be doing in-depth research on ice cream makers, but I did and I did and I want to share with you what I learned. McDonald's is getting on my nerves and the machine is

always

down the ice cream machine is broken and if we try to pull the lever this will happen sorry the ice cream machine is broken the McDonald's broken ice cream machine epidemic has been so extended for so long it's a meme you know what they're going to say you know the ice cream machine is broken the ice cream machine is broken sounds like there's a story behind it one doesn't do it right now if you look a mcbroken about 13 of the refrigerators in the us are not working that's any red dot on this map what a brilliant little tool Rashik made I mean this is so good so Jack why do the ice machines Are ice cream always broken?

Once the internet started noticing this, the Wall Street Journal and Business Insider and many other media outlets started reporting on this and the conclusion they came to was that these machines aren't actually broken, they're just going through a cycle of failure. Very long and complicated cleaning that lasts four hours straight and when that happens, the employees say so. It's broken because it's easier but don't take my word for it so when you go there and they tell you it's broken there's a high chance it's not broken it's just closed for maintenance that's fine so human error and this long cleaning cycle. was the conclusion everyone came to and everyone seemed to be satisfied with it, I mean I would be satisfied with that, it's a pretty tight conclusion, but wait a second, wait a minute, do you have ice cream?

Yes, I was right at McDonald's and the ice cream machine was broken and it always seems to be. The ice cream machine breaks here very often. No, yes, that's a McDonald's problem. We wash our machines. All. Oh that's great, is it easy to do or is it quite complicated? No, actually it is very. it's easy to clean they're just lazy it's the longest trigger so Wendy's doesn't have this problem and the crazy thing is they use the same brand of machine as McDonald's and yet they don't have a broken brand it's not the internet. meme for them nor is it for other places that use the same brand of ice cream machine like in and out or chick-fil-a or many others, so why is it only McDonald's that has a problem with the ice cream machine? make ice cream broken yes If you want a real answer on this, you need to talk to the people who suffer the most when these machines break down, which is actually not the McDonald's company, it's the people who own these individual restaurants or franchises, these are the people who pay the price of lost income. when the machine breaks down, so I talked to them, I talked to managers who actually deal with broken machines, and I also dug into this 111-page owner's manual, which is not a read I recommend, but I'll summarize what it says and what it says.

I found. It is as mind-blowing as it is infuriating to understand this. You have to understand how these ice cream machines work and why they break, so I ask you to be patient while we learn how an ice cream machine at McDonald's works and why it always breaks. once you understand that, you'll understand who's getting rich every time one of these things breaks and why they have an incentive to keep them broken and I said, okay, I'm going to guess it'll be about five percent and he went back to like 13, which is crazy, one question to ask yourself is: should I build ice cream machines?

If after 17 years you still can't use the software properly, no, yes, that's a McDonald's problem, okay, real quick, I just want to talk about life insurance. something we don't really want to talk about very often but probably should talk about. In fact, for the last year and a half I've been trying to get life insurance and I haven't gotten it because I've been like, how can I get life insurance? and what it has been is life insurance and everything that the sponsor of today's video answers that question. Policy Genius is a marketplace where you can go, compare prices and save on life insurance.

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If you want to start a McDonald's franchise, sign an agreement with the McDonald's company that says I will open a restaurant and I will make sure everything is standardized. It's part of this agreement that says you have to use this type of fries and you have to use one of two different companies for your fryer and your grill or whatever, when this new ice cream machine came out in 2003, McDonald's had in their According to all their franchises, which are like 16,000 in the United States, they had to use this machine, no other machine. They couldn't use any other machine on the planet, they had to use the C602 made by McDonald's and Taylor.

It was in their agreement. Typically, franchisees can choose from several different companies for the equipment in their store, but in this case they did not have to use c602. so let's dive deeper into this machine. Ice cream is dairy and dairy must be kept at a certain temperature to stay safe. The machine itself has all these pipes that they run dairy through all the time, so what they do once a day is heat up. The entire machine, including the ice cream mix, reaches 151 degrees Fahrenheit. They leave it at that temperature for a while while it kills all the bacteria and then drops it back down to a freezing temperature where it turns into ice cream.

This process takes approximately four hours. hours and this is what you hear all the time as an explanation for why the machine is always off, but here is the nuance that really illuminates the story, usually the employees do this during the night while the store is closed, someone in the night shift sets in. The cleaning cycle continues and then they close for the night the next morning. New employees who will open the store in the morning show up and look at the ice cream machine and on the screen they usually see one of two things: The heat cycle was successful. ice cream maker is ready to use or heat cycle failed.

They don't know exactly why the heat cycle failed overnight. They're looking at this interface that looks like it's from 1983 and all they see is something like a heat mode glitch or something. another obscure code that doesn't really tell you what happened, the machine is completely locked until you successfully run one of these heat cycles, you should run the heat cycle even if the heat cycle didn't meet one of these endpoints reference by like a degree, you're still alone I'll tell you something failed, it doesn't tell you why or to what extent, the employee tells his manager, the manager has no idea why the heat cycle failed, so you just tell your employee to run it again, luckily it's morning so people aren't getting ice cream yet but they like to run the warming cycle again so the employee runs the warming cycle again and it fails again, probably for the same

reason

it failed in the first place, which no one knows at this point, p.s. like a c602 ice cream machine.

Insider info, the

reason

it failed is probably because the hopper is too full of ice cream mixture and it takes a while to heat and cool that huge stuff, so fill it a little less next time. However, there are many reasons why it could fail. No one knows because they are just sitting there trying to serve customers. I worked in fast food in high school. It is a chaotic world. You're just trying to make people happy while the person is trying to like running. the heat cycle fails again, then the heat cycle fails again. The manager is angry, there are angry people ordering ice cream and everyone says yes, the ice cream machine is not working.

Sorry, we can't do anything about it, so finally the manager calls the franchise. owner the business owner and says what do we do and the franchise owner says we need to increase ice cream sales this is not right we are losing money just call the guy just call the guy that's word for word what one of the owners of thefranchise told me that when things are crazy I just tell them to call the guy now we're getting to the heart of it the guy in this case means a man or woman who is an authorized service technician for taylor, the company that manufactures the machine remember this the ice cream machine is not working now I'm just here to make the ice cream okay yeah okay because I've never seen the uniform so I'm a little bit oh okay yeah we changed things up oh so it's still there custom made, yes ma'am, ok, it turns out that Taylor is the only company authorized to repair and maintain these machines.

It's in her contract if she calls someone else, but first, Taylor wouldn't know how to use them. Because it is a very strange esoteric machine, but it would also void your contract, your warranty, so you call the service technician, he or she comes to repair the machine, we have in our hands some real invoices that show how much this repair personnel costs to Measurement is different in each market and for each scenario, but somewhere around 144 for the first 30 minutes and then up to hundreds of dollars for every additional 15 minutes thereafter, so the desperate franchise owner, the whoever runs the business has to decide if I deal with angry customers who yell at me because I don't have ice cream or I just call the guy and ask him to come fix this at any cost it doesn't matter so these franchise owners end up paying thousands and thousands of dollars not because your employees are incompetent or poorly trained, but because this machine blocks them and they have no idea why they are looking at a screen that looks like this and all roads point.

To call the service technician, I saw a lot of ads for people from Taylor company who make this ice cream machine and do all the maintenance on it. They barely talk about their product here. Their ads are more about how great their repair team is. Not the innovators. they build machines they solve problems this is an expert technician there are 6,500 tailor technicians around the world ready to help you the taylor company a few years ago taylor was in talks to be acquired by another company called middleby they put together a presentation of all their financials to say, look how good our business is and in that presentation they said 25 of their revenue comes from this repair and parts service of their business, yes they make ice cream machines but a quarter of their business comes from maintenance alone. and fix this type of recurring income that you can rely on month after month is like gold for investors.

People love this because it's like you can project how much money you will make each month if you can rely on a certain income channel. In your business, Taylor can rely on McDonald's ice cream machine services and repairs. remember up until a couple of years ago, for years and years, mcdonald's franchises were only allowed to use taylor machines, they had no options, they couldn't say wow, this machine! It sucks, I'm going somewhere else, so they had to use the machines anyway and they had to use this specific machine that breaks all the time. Our parts and service network is what makes Taylor the company of choice for the food service industry. no matter what time of day the ice cream machine is broken Donald is making my baby cry how we get the software for some of these machines to see how Taylor has tried to improve the software component, you can imagine that with a machine that is notoriously broken all the time, I would update their software to provide more useful user feedback, like, hey, your cleaning cycle failed last night by just one degree and that's probably because your hopper was too full, try filling it a little less Next time.

Unfortunately no, since 2003 when this came out there have been quite a few software updates, but instead of improving the usability of the software, the software has actually introduced new sets of cryptic error codes that don't help anyone solve any problems. . I've spent hours. In this instruction manual I go over all the error codes and what they mean. I feel like maybe after reading this a few times and being in the weeds I could operate one of these machines and maybe understand what happens when things fail, but it's clear to me that this machine is not set up for the user to succeed. in diagnosing and solving the problem.

One person I was talking to told me like they just opened a store and it was a new store, a new machine and it's like, in the first few months we called the guy four or five times. I'm impressed that a product like this with such cryptic and horrible software can exist in 2021. The menus are terribly complicated, the error codes are not helpful, the buttons. They don't have words on them, instead they're like a bunch of symbols, like press the flavor button, press the ice cream button to get here, to get to this menu, press these two buttons at the same time, it's like how could i?

Is anyone, especially an entry-level employee who has been on the job for a few days, ever expected to understand all of this? It is a product that is set up to fail and has no incentive to improve because what this means for Taylor is simply more service and repairs in his pocket 25 of his entire business is based on this and then there is the secret menu in addition to the manual of instructions given to users. I also got the service manual that is given to the Taylor service people as this is like the internal manual that gives you a complete picture of this machine.

I do not recommend that you read it. In this manual you will learn about a separate menu for service technicians. It's called the service menu. This is not accessible to the user. who owns the machine, the franchise owner, is only accessible to service technicians who have the very specific code for it. The existence of this service menu is nowhere to be found in the user manual, which was given to the person who owned the machine and yet I agree with this. manual, this menu contains quotes of critical operating parameters for the machine, so wait if this machine breaks down all the time and you have a franchise owner who is trying to keep his customers happy and there is a menu where critical operating parameters are quoted that the owner does not have access to simply call the type, simply call the type, the machine is not intended to give the user a clear idea of ​​why it breaks down.

A few weeks ago, a Taylor service technician realized that he needed to install this new software update on all McDonald's. machines, he noticed that the update had a bunch of new and strange error codes that were making the machine worse and less functional, so he posted a video about it asking other service technicians for help shortly after posting the video, the video He disappeared when asked what happened. he responded with a quote: The system defeated me. They clearly told him to delete the video. someone doesn't want this kind of stuff on the internet. Now listen, this is not a conspiracy.

There are all kinds of strange conspiracies surrounding ice cream machines. This is. In one of those, this is actually very rational human and business behavior when one has a monopoly on ice cream manufacturers and they have created a particularly shitty product that breaks all the time and doesn't give users a clear answer. about why it's broken. there is no incentive to improve in an open market the incentive to improve your product comes from the competition and basically it comes from ramifications, you will be out of business if you don't make a good product, in this case that is not the dynamic and in fact, Having a bad product is incentivized because it means more money in services and repairs for this business and the reason McDonald's is okay with that is because the cost is not paid by them, but by the local franchise owners who have to pay for the products. services. and repair taylor has the ability to make and improve ice cream machines, they do that all the time at wendy's and chick-fil-a, inside and out, and yet the machine made for their exclusive partner McDonald's does not receive the same improvement and Instead of refinement you get a bunch of new error codes and a terrible user experience that always leads to calling a franchise owner I spoke to who said all roads lead to calling the technician this way.

This product is designed for you to call the technician right now. Right now, as I speak to you, 15 of all ice cream machines in the US do not meet the standard for most industrial products, that is, they have a failure rate of less than one percent for their product; In fact, the actual target for mass industrial products is 99.99966. of the time your product is running, that's 3.14 errors per million opportunities, what you're seeing here with 15 is a dismal failure and is the product of no pressure or incentive to improve and, in fact, a perverse incentive to maintain it.

Shit, the last chapter of the story is the one that is still unfolding today and it has to do with the email I received a few months ago from someone who is in the middle of this. I'm going to lay out some facts here. I'll let the news play over the next few weeks and months to see how this plays out, but this is what's happening. The guy who approached me originally was someone named Jeremy, he's a tech entrepreneur, he invented a product that could basically solve this problem. Terrible feedback for the user of these ice cream machines.

It's this device that you plug into your ice cream maker and it connects to your phone and gives you solid reports on all the things that happen in your ice cream maker, something this doesn't do. identifies practical things you can do to train your employees and ensure the problem does not occur again. It basically prevents this from happening in the first place and prevents me from having to call the guy all the time as soon as Jeremy launched this product. It was a big hit among franchise owners. They started selling hundreds of these things to franchises across the country.

People magazine reports that the chain has partnered with kitsch, a company that created technology to help employees manage machines and reduce downtime. Franchise owners I spoke to said that instead of getting these vague error codes now, they are actually getting solid reports about what is happening inside this machine and that they would like to train their employees to help prevent this. Now let me caution for a second that Jeremy and his company kitsch obviously have a huge financial stake in this story. I am aware that he approached me and gave me some of this information and that there is a huge conflict of interest in terms of neutral journalism and that my informant is someone who can make a lot of money if this story breaks and that is why that it took me literally months to report it.

I had to independently review and report and verify every single thing that jeremy has told me, so yes, while there is a lot at stake for jeremy and kitsch for this story and exactly what I'm saying here, the fact is that everything what I've said here is verified in my own independent reporting, let it be known, okay, so kitsch became so popular among franchise owners that at this conference where all the franchise owners got together at the end of last year to have a conference to talk about McDonald's stuff, it sounds like a fascinating conference, the head of this organization of franchise owners stands up and says this is not a silver bullet, but I think the information it provides raises awareness and gives as result faster reaction times when a problem occurs now to be clear this is not McDonald's approved equipment I mean he kind of backed it up he said this is a great product it's actually helping us shortly after this. backup McDonald's sends an email to all of their franchises saying that they have determined that kitsch is actually super dangerous, can cause serious safety risks, and recommend that franchise owners stop using it, saying they will void their warranty if they wait.

So you have this device that is clearly solving an important problem and instead of telling us more about it, let's see if we can approve it and put it in more stores, they blacklist it and scare a bunch of them away. to franchisees not to use it, I contacted McDonald's directly to ask them directly, like what the fuck, why are they blacklisting a product that has the potential to solve this problem that they make fun of all the time on the internet Why did they consult me ​​again? some boilerplate advertising language about being committed to your customers and all that, being able to buy candy and all this and then this little nugget at the end where they say that McDonald's is testing a connectivity solution with an approved McDonald's supplier, inIn other words, McDonald's is working on a product that does the exact same thing, and the company they are using to do this is called Powerhouse Dynamics, which they hope is owned by the same company that owns Taylor, they are under the same parent company, Taylor. and powerful dynamics, they keep it in the family, oh, and this device, the new one they are testing, does not give the complete picture to the user, it continues to block them from certain aspects of the machine that could be useful in diagnosing why the machine always it's broken the theme here is the same it's been all along two old companies that have been working together for a long time taking care of each other and maintaining control over the data so they can save their necks from being disrupted by new technology that's how this story is as old as time and it's happening right here in a potentially collusive way again is this a deep conspiracy?

These are older companies that fear being disrupted by better, smarter products and doing everything they can to retain their market share. This new connectivity product that McDonald's mentioned to me basically does the same thing as the kitsch, but this new device doesn't. actually gives the full picture, it still locks the user out of those things that have been behind the technician's secret menu the things that the user manual itself says are critical it's the same old story of keeping tight control over the data and the experience that the user has that they can continue to maintain their exclusive relationship with services and repairs, which is 25 of their business, is honestly smart, clever and ruthless business behavior, but you know who it hurts, it hurts the franchisees and it hurts us. it hurts all of us who want to buy mcflurries, this is anti-competitive behavior that tries to crush new products in the name of retaining control forThere are a lot of nuances here that I have analyzed very quickly, but the result is that McDonald's ice cream machines are more broken than everyone else's ice cream makers, even though they are made by the same company because the company that makes them has no incentive to improve and, in fact, has an incentive to maintain them poorly over the years, They have done a terrible job improving their software and have kept employees, managers and franchisees in the dark about what is really going on with their ice cream machine. preventing them from being able to fix it themselves and when someone finally comes along with a product that could actually fix it, they squash it with the name of their own product, which is a worse version of what that new product was going to do, kitsch. is suing McDonald's for a lot of things and read the lawsuit if you want and certainly in the coming months we will learn the details of exactly how all this is happening, but for now, the next time I'm at McDonald's and I don't have ice cream, I just know it's not because of lazy employees, it's not because of lack of training, it's because there is an old relationship between two old companies that don't want things to change.