If you've ever been bamboozled by a McDonald's ice cream machine being broken, raise your hand. Us too. Nobody wants to go to Mickey D's craving a tasty milkshake, cone, or McFlurry, try to order one, and hear "sorry, our machine is down."
McDonald's ice cream machines are broken so often that it's become one of the internet's long-standing memes. The problem is so widely known that there's literally a website, called mcbroken.com, dedicated to telling customers across the United States, United Kingdom, and Germany if the ice cream machines are working at their store.
Not only have customers been calling out McDonald's on social media for years, but competitors like Wendy's get in on the action too. In 2021, the McDonald's account tweeted "if u were the person who ran the McDonald's account for a day, what would u tweet," to which the Wendy's account responded, "where the things that should be fresh are frozen, and the things that should be frozen are out of order."
Even McDonald's has roasted itself for the machines constantly being down. In 2020, the brand tweeted "we have a joke about our soft serve machine but we're worried it won't work."
So if McDonald's knows about the problem, and is admitting it's a real issue, why are the ice cream machines always broken? We've got the scoop, so let's dig in.
Why Are McDonald's Ice Cream Machines Always Down?
McDonald's has a partnership with the Taylor Company, which manufactures its ice cream machines. Prior to 2017, when someone opened a new McDonald's franchise, they could only purchase a Taylor brand ice cream machine to make ice cream, milkshakes, sundaes, and McFlurries. Now, franchisees can also purchase ice cream machines made by Carpigiani, however, Taylor is still the standard.
Even though the Taylor Company makes ice cream machines for other big brands, like Wendy's, Chick-fil-A, and Dairy Queen, the McDonald's ice cream machines are the ones that always seem to have problems. Why only the McDonald's machines? Because Taylor makes a specific machine that's only given to McDonald's, called the C602 model.
This specific model has a very extensive cleaning process. So when McDonald's employees tell you the machine is down, it may just be getting cleaned. You might think, who cleans a machine in the middle of the day? Or even, those employees are lying, no one is actually cleaning the machine — which might be closer to the truth. Not because the employees don't want to serve you ice cream or don't want to clean the machine, but because the machine is supposed to clean itself.
The Taylor ice cream machine takes four hours to clean and sanitize itself — and the process needs to be completed every single day. During these four hours, the machine, of course, cannot make ice cream. However, the employees know this, so most of the time they clean the machine at night.
The night shift employees turn the machine's cleaning function on, leave, and then the morning shift employees come in to find a (hopefully) clean machine waiting for them. But sometimes they aren't that lucky.
Instead of finding a clean machine ready to serve ice cream, the employees find a machine boasting an error message telling them that it didn't clean properly and will need to be cleaned again. The kicker? The error message doesn't say what went wrong, just that it needs to try cleaning again.
These machines can have a ton of different errors, according to Johnny Harris, a YouTuber who read the entire Taylor machine manual. So by not telling the user what the error is, the user is forced to try the cleaning process again with no knowledge of how to fix it. So, it's likely that after the next four hours, another error message will appear.
This vicious cycle will continue until the employees finally give up and call a technician. Now, this is the part that's going to start sounding like a conspiracy theory, but we promise (we hope) it's not. The only technicians that McDonald's franchisees are allowed to use to fix the Taylor Company machines are Taylor Company technicians.
Some people go as far as to say that Taylor designs these machines to be faulty, so it can charge extra for more repairs. While that can't be proven, it is true that Taylor rakes in a large amount of extra cash for performing these repairs. In 2018, the company's own acquisition review stated that 25% of revenue came from "recurring parts and services business."
The Carpigiani machines are looking a little better. But even though the Carpigiani machines don't seem to break down as much, the issue with those machines is that the company is based in Italy. So if the machine does break down or if it needs a replacement part, the parts are coming from Italy, which can take a while to get here. So most McDonald's franchisees prefer to use Taylor machines because when the machine inevitably goes down, the technician is local and they won't have to wait as long for a fix.
What Happened to the Supposed Ice Cream Machine Fix?
You may remember back in 2020 that a new start-up company came on the scene saying it could fix the McDonald's ice cream machines. Kytch created a small computer that would go inside the ice cream machines to provide real-time data that addressed errors. The computer would connect to an app and show the employees the reason the ice cream machine is throwing an error message — so there would be no more guesswork.
The Kytch program was installed in a few McDonald's franchises, and the technology worked. The success, however, was short-lived because McDonald's sent an email to its franchisees saying that installing Kytch would void Taylor's warranties, so it discouraged the use of Kytch. Then, Taylor created its own technology, the Taylor Shake Sundae Connectivity (TSSC), that essentially performs the same functions as Kytch's software.
This led to Kytch filing a lawsuit against Taylor and one McDonald's franchisee in 2021. The suit claims the franchisee gave Taylor access to Kytch's software so that Taylor could reverse engineer Kytch's software and create the TSSC.
The lawsuit also claims that "Taylor machines are designed to prohibit users from accessing the fulsome 'Technician's Menu' that operates the machines. Taylor's menu contains confusing messages that leave McDonald's franchisees frustrated and unable to operate the machine, causing them to 'call the technician' for even minor problems."
The lawsuit is ongoing, so for now we're still stuck with broken ice cream machines. (At least we still have the famous fries.) But hopefully, the lawsuit, coupled with the fact that the Federal Trade Commission began looking into McDonald's broken ice cream machines in 2021, means we'll have machines that are always up and running in the future. For now, keep checking the mcbroken site before heading to McDonald's with your ice cream hopes up.
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