Every American has heard the same sentence crackle out of a drive-thru speaker: sorry, the ice cream machine is broken. It has been a running joke for a decade. There is a website that tracks it. What almost nobody standing at the counter knows is that franchise owners once had a fix, a small device from a startup called Kytch that sat inside the machine and sent its error codes to a phone or web app in plain English. On November 2, 2020, McDonald’s sent franchisees a field brief recommending they pull the device out of their machines.
That email, and what came out about it later, is the part of this story the chain never put on a menu board. Kytch sued, and the court filings dragged internal messages into public view.
The gadget that disappeared overnight
Kytch was built by two California entrepreneurs, Jeremy O’Sullivan and Melissa Nelson, and went on sale in 2019. Their phone-sized box sat inside the soft serve machine, intercepted its internal communications and sent them to a web or smartphone screen, with tools to run some functions remotely. By the end of 2020, according to WIRED, it had 500 customers and was doubling its sales every quarter.
McDonald’s field brief said the device “allows complete access to all aspects of the equipment’s controller and confidential data” and “creates a potential very serious safety risk for the crew or technician attempting to clean or repair the machine.” It also warned franchisees that the device violated the machines’ warranties. Sales stalled. Kytch sued the machine maker, Taylor, and its distributor in California state court in May 2021, and in March 2022 it filed a separate $900 million lawsuit against McDonald’s alone in federal court. In August 2022 an Alameda County judge let most of Kytch’s claims against Taylor go forward. In the McDonald’s case, a federal judge allowed part of the suit to proceed in March 2023, and in May 2025 the two sides agreed to dismiss it without disclosing any terms. Kytch has said it never received a single safety complaint about its device. Taylor’s parent company has said it stands by the accuracy of the field brief.
Kytch’s March 2022 filing alleges McDonald’s and Taylor had been coordinating for months before the email went out. Later in the litigation, Kytch put forward an October 2020 email in which the CEO of Taylor’s parent company, Middleby, wrote, “Not sure if there is anything we can do to slow up the franchise community on the other solution.” Middleby has said McDonald’s issued the field brief on its own. O’Sullivan has said Taylor “tried to falsely smear Kytch as dangerous and ultimately destroy our business,” and called its service business a “wildly successful repair racket.”
Why the machines lock themselves up
Taylor, based in Rockton, Illinois, makes the soft serve machines in most of McDonald’s more than 13,000 U.S. restaurants, though franchisees are also allowed an Italian machine from Carpigiani. A Taylor machine sells for about $18,000, according to WIRED, so nobody is replacing one lightly.
The software is the sore point. When something is off, the machine throws a cryptic code and refuses to dispense, and the full diagnostic menu sits behind a passcode that Taylor technicians use. That can leave an owner waiting on a service call before the soft serve flows again. The FTC reportedly looked into the machines in 2021, and in 2024 the FTC and Justice Department backed a repair exemption. In October 2024 the U.S. Copyright Office granted it, making it legal to get around the software locks on commercial food equipment like these machines in order to repair them.
Sometimes nothing is wrong with it at all
Former employee Lorella Palmer put it bluntly: “It’s never broken. If it’s running out of the mix for the ice cream for the milkshakes and no one fills up, it goes into what’s called heat treat mode.” The nightly heat cycle that pasteurizes the machine takes about four hours, and while it runs, nobody is getting a McFlurry. Tracking site McBroken put the share of machines down at any one time between 13 and 17 percent, WIRED reported in 2023.
The burger seasoning is salt and pepper
Mike Haracz, who worked as a corporate chef for McDonald’s, went on TikTok to settle the question of a secret spice blend. There isn’t one, and McDonald’s own ingredient list says as much. The ratio is 86 percent salt to 14 percent pepper, and that proportion is the entire trick. Weighed out at home, that is 8.6 grams of salt for every 1.4 grams of cracked pepper. Most people eyeball it, go heavy on the pepper, and wonder why their patty tastes like a diner burger instead of a McDonald’s one.
Big Mac sauce contains no ketchup
The orange-pink color fools almost everybody. There is no ketchup in it. McDonald’s published ingredient list runs through soybean oil, sweet relish, egg yolks, distilled vinegar, spices, onion powder, garlic powder, sugar, caramel color, turmeric and paprika extractives, and the color comes from those last three. Haracz’s homemade copycat gets close with mayo, sweet pickle relish, mustard, vinegar and paprika. Either way it tastes nothing like the ketchup-and-mayo sauces other chains pour on their burgers.
Order the round egg, always
There is a quality ladder built into the breakfast menu and nothing on the board tells you about it. The round egg on a McMuffin is cracked fresh in the store and cooked in a ring mold, and Haracz has called it “the best egg, quality-wise.” The folded egg that goes on biscuit and bagel sandwiches arrives as a frozen, fully cooked square and gets reheated. The Big Breakfast scramble comes from liquid egg.
The Coke is engineered, right down to the straw
You are not imagining the difference. The chain says its water and syrup are pre-chilled before they reach the fountain, and the syrup ratio is set to allow for ice melting in the cup. Then there is the straw, which McDonald’s says is slightly wider than usual “so all that Coke taste can hit your taste buds.” The chain has been moving to new clear straws since late 2024, so the one in your cup may not be the one that started the legend.
Your chicken is cooked past where it needs to be
If a McDonald’s chicken product has ever struck you as dry, there may be a reason. Haracz has explained that most items are cooked to a 165-degree target, but the process is built so that even the biggest nugget in the least efficient fryer gets there, which leaves typical pieces 10 or 15 degrees hotter. In his words, it will be “well overcooked for food safety.”
The fries are not vegetarian in America
Check the U.S. ingredient list and the fries carry natural beef flavor and hydrolyzed milk. McDonald’s fried its potatoes in beef tallow until the start of the 1990s, and when that stopped, customers hated the new taste. The fix was adding beef flavoring at the factories where the fries are par-cooked before freezing. Everybody got their old fries back except the vegetarians, who mostly had no idea. The same fries are vegan in the UK. Vegetarian crew members tend to find this out by reading the box.
Holding timers get ignored
Cooked food goes into a warming bin with a timer, and when the timer sounds it is supposed to be tossed. Former workers posting online have described stores where those timers were only respected when a health inspector or a senior manager walked in, and everything else sat until it sold. Low-turnover items are the ones to watch, grilled chicken especially. A tip that circulates among crews is asking for fries with no salt, which forces a brand new basket. Expect a wait and expect nobody behind the counter to be delighted about it.
Breakfast ends before it ends
Breakfast at most U.S. McDonald’s ends at 10:30 a.m. on weekdays, though hours vary by store, and former crew members say some registers flip to lunch a few minutes early. If you are cutting it close, assume you are too late. Part of the reason the cutoff exists at all is physical: many kitchens share grill and assembly space, so moving from eggs and muffins to burgers means reconfiguring the line, not flipping a switch.
There is no secret menu, but ask anyway
Corporate will not acknowledge a secret menu, because every item sold needs an ingredient statement and nutrition data attached to it. Crew members tell a different story: they can make any combination of what is already in the building. Grilled cheese gets ordered constantly and plenty of stores will build it. Just know that a custom order breaks the assembly rhythm and slows down everyone in line behind you.
Sweet tea and birthday cake
A former manager’s account on TikTok had the sweet tea made with a four-pound bag of sugar per four-gallon batch, and McDonald’s has listed a small sweet tea at 24 grams of sugar, more than half of what is in a can of Coke. Some former workers also say a few locations keep Ronald McDonald birthday cakes on hand for parties, so it can be worth calling ahead.
Most of this is trivia you can use at the counter tomorrow. The ice cream machine is not trivia. A company sold a tool that let restaurant owners fix their own equipment, a corporate email ended its run, and most of what we know came out only because Kytch sued. Since October 2024, repairing these machines without waiting on the manufacturer has been legal.
