Does McDonald’s Want Their Soft-Serve Machines To Stay Broken?

McDonald’s soft-serve machines break down so often that a corner of the internet is awash in memes and videos about their unreliability. Enter Jeremy O’Sullivan and Melissa Nelson, two entrepreneurs who wanted to fix the broken machines. They thought they'd succeeded — until McDonald’s told its franchisees to stay away.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Dan Pashman?

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• 0:32Dan Pashman?

  I grew up on Lando Lakes cheese. I still remember going to the supermarket deli counter with my mom and her ordering Lando Lakes American cheese. And now, Lando Lakes cheese and butter are a huge part of my home. There are so many easy weeknight recipes using Lando Lakes cheese and butter that bring delicious restaurant taste right to your table. From chicken parm to weeknight shrimp pad Thai, Lando Lakes has plenty of quick dishes that'll have the whole dinner table talking. Visit landolakes.com/reцепes/collection for easy weeknight dinners.

• 1:04Speaker 01

  Sirius XM Podcasts.

• 1:12Dan Pashman?

  This episode contains explicit language.

• 1:16Dan Pashman?

  A while back, I called up Andy Greenberg. He's a senior writer at Wired, the tech magazine. Andy's one of the country's top cybersecurity reporters. He's written books about WikiLeaks and cyber warfare with Russia. His article about a successful hack of Jeeps led to 1.4 million cars being recalled. And when you do work like that, you get a lot of people coming out of the woodwork with stories they really think you should write about. And a lot of those stories are pretty hard to believe. So I asked him, what's the most outlandish thing that anyone ever came to you with that turned out to be true?

• 1:47Speaker 02

  Oh, man.

• 1:50Speaker 02

  I can't actually think of a better one offhand than this story, than Jeremy O'Sullivan and his whole McDonald's conspiracy theory.

• 2:06Dan Pashman?

  This is The Sporkful. It's not for foodies, it's for eaters. I'm Dan Pashman. Each week on our show, we obsess about food to learn more about people. So Andy Greenberg is this cybersecurity reporter. And one day, he gets a message from a guy named Jeremy O'Sullivan.

• 2:21Speaker 02

  He hooks me with this idea that there is a secret code in McDonald's ice cream machines. And that, in fact, even the owners of those machines, the franchisees who buy them for $18,000 and keep them behind the counter to make shakes and McFlurries and whatever, that they don't know the secret code. And that that secret code is the only way to unlock a lot of the machines' data. You know, like the real data that shows how they operate, the viscosity of their ingredients, the temperature of the heating elements. That immediately hooks me, but he's already like in these initial text messages going further. And he tells me, quote unquote, "We've learned some crazy secrets about these machines."

• 3:04Speaker 02

  And I was sort of like, well, we'll see.

• 3:07Dan Pashman?

  Andy started doing some digging and learned that Jeremy O'Sullivan and his girlfriend, Melissa Nelson, were themselves in the fast food ice cream business. The couple first met at Bucknell University in 2005. After they graduated, they both became accountants, accountants who happened to love frozen yogurt. This is around the time that all those froyo chains were popping up. Remember Pinkberry, Red Mango, Tasty Delight, 16 Handles? It was a bona fide fad, one that's actually back, by the way. But anyway, Melissa and Jeremy thought the business model for these places was inefficient. Here's Melissa.

• 3:38Speaker 03

  So if you walk into a frozen yogurt store, it's usually 1,500 square feet. And there are usually about six to eight soft-serve machines. Then you have your toppings on another wall. There's someone standing at the front of the house to check you out. But there's a lot of wasted space. There are a lot of fixed costs that are unnecessary.

• 3:58Speaker 04

  And so we're like, hmm.

• 3:59Dan Pashman?

  Here's Jeremy.

• 4:00Speaker 04

  You know, if we shrink the store and the experience around this machine, we can drop this machine into a mall. You know, this machine would become kind of untethered if we could protect it and brand it.

• 4:11Dan Pashman?

  Their business idea, a fro yo vending machine. No cashier, no storefront. Just take a fro yo machine and build a nice box around it. Add a touchscreen and a credit card reader, and you're selling the same product as the chains with much lower costs. They decided to call their machine Frobot. Seemed like it could work. Just one thing, they had to figure out how to build it. Step one, get a fro yo machine to play with.

• 4:35Speaker 03

  And when we looked at the brands, the main manufacturer, the most popular, was Taylor. Same exact brand that was in McDonald's, Burger King, In-N-Out. So we purchased a used Taylor machine off of Craigslist. And that's how we got started.

• 4:53Speaker 04

  We bought it from Mr. Florida in 1979. There's this guy owned a gym in Tampa, Florida. And, you know, he bought like a frozen yogurt machine for his gym.

• 5:06Speaker 03

  It was a C708, is that right?

• 5:09Speaker 04

  C706.

• 5:10Dan Pashman?

  And do you remember how much it cost?

• 5:11Speaker 04

  It was like $4,000, $3,500, in that range.

• 5:16Dan Pashman?

  Melissa and Jeremy were focused on fro yo, but they learned that Taylor also makes machines that produce soft serve, gelato, milkshakes. Taylor's one of the biggest names in the industrial creamy frozen treat industry. They distribute their machines all over the world. Melissa and Jeremy went all in and quit their accounting jobs. After spending three years tinkering and close to $50,000, they finally got a Frobot up and running. So Melissa, do you remember the first time that you ordered yourself a fro yo from your very first Frobot?

• 5:47Speaker 03

  I do. I, I think the machine might have overheated. But yes, I, I do, I do remember that. I think we served cookie butter first, and it was excellent. I didn't have a background in mechanical engineering or anything of that nature or software at the time. But we figured it out and we pieced it together. And we actually had a prototype that worked.

• 6:11Speaker 04

  It was, it was exciting to see it work. When you're, when you're bootstrapping something and you're building something, and it's this super expensive machine. When it did ultimately work, it was like, oh, thank God.

• 6:25Dan Pashman?

  Jeremy and Melissa say the folks at Taylor, who make those ice cream and froyo machines, were supportive of the Frobot concept. They thought it could be a way for them to sell more machines. So Taylor loaned some units to Melissa and Jeremy to test out, and the couple bought several more outright. Jeremy and Melissa made more Frobot prototypes, refining the design. They noticed the Taylor machines were temperamental, but they kept moving forward. They started working to get Frobots placed around the Bay Area so they could test them in the wild, see how they'd hold up to a higher volume. They got two in a Tesla factory and six at Levi's Stadium, where the San Francisco 49ers play. That's when those Taylor machines started giving them real problems.

• 7:04Speaker 03

  We just had so many issues keeping it operational. We experienced a lot of downtime.

• 7:10Dan Pashman?

  Now, the thing you've got to understand about these machines, they're incredibly complicated with hundreds of parts. In the user manual for one model, the diagrams and list of parts take up 27 pages. There are more than 30 O-rings. You know, those little rubber or plastic rings that make a seal? And they're all different sizes. And because they're serving up a dairy product, they have to be cleaned regularly. That means taking apart and reassembling the machine and making sure each tiny part is in just the right place. If it's not, the machine probably won't work.

• 7:39Speaker 03

  You forget one O-ring, and you're out of business for the day.

• 7:43Dan Pashman?

  Some of the Taylor machines also go through a pasteurization process every night. So everything inside, including the soft-serve mix, heats up to 151 degrees, then cools back down to freezing. One worker, who was maintaining a Frobot at Tesla, forgot to replace one part in the tank before the pasteurization process started.

• 8:02Speaker 03

  And when you do that, the mix, when you forget that part, boils over. And so what would happen is during the evening, the mix would go everywhere.

• 8:12Dan Pashman?

  I'm picturing like a witch's cauldron, but like filled with froyo.

• 8:16Speaker 03

  Exactly. Something very similar. Something disturbing. And when they would come in in the morning, open the door to the Frobot, you know, the machine was locked out. There was ice cream everywhere. And it would just lead to the entire day being wasted.

• 8:36Dan Pashman?

  As you can imagine, for Melissa and Jeremy, these malfunctions were very frustrating. And when they looked online, they realized they weren't alone. Taylor ice cream machines were wreaking havoc across the country. And there was one model that seemed to be notorious, the C602, which Taylor only sells to McDonald's. Here again is Wired reporter Andy Greenberg.

• 8:56Speaker 02

  Almost all of the McDonald's in America buy this one Taylor C602 machine. The Taylor machine breaks like all the time. I mean, to a almost absurd degree. I started just like Googling and, you know, searching Twitter. I was kind of overwhelmed, like I could not believe what a social media phenomenon this is. I mean, it is a meme, like it's a full-blown meme. McDonald's ice cream machines being broken all the time.

• 9:26Dan Pashman?

  You know what's a meme where there's an original TikTok song?

• 9:29Speaker 05

  Welcome to McDonald's, what you order? Can I get an Oreo, Mayflower? We're not serving ice cream right now. It's broken at the moment, can I get you something?

• 9:39Dan Pashman?

  And tons of YouTube rants like this one.

• 9:41Speaker 06

  No matter what time of the day I go to McDonald's, the damn ice cream machine is broke. How? How? And it doesn't matter what location I go to, even to the white people's McDonald's in the nicer neighborhoods, this shit is broke.

• 9:58Speaker 02

  I mean, it has truly become a kind of shorthand for frustration with capitalism, frustration with technology, just frustration in daily life.

• 10:07Dan Pashman?

  There's even a website called McBroken.com. Andy explains that it uses a bot that tries to place online orders for ice cream in every McDonald's in the US every 30 minutes. If McDonald's online system won't allow the bot to order ice cream, that means the machine there is down. Each location is mapped along with its status and updated in real time.

• 10:29Speaker 02

  And the numbers were kind of staggering. I mean, the overall number would fluctuate anywhere from like 5 to 16% in the time that I was looking at this for the story. Yeah, I've seen as much as like 30% of all McDonald's ice cream machines in New York City being Down at one time, which is just absurd.

• 10:47Dan Pashman?

  And it's even to the point that McDonald's themselves has made fun of themselves, right? They tweeted in 2020, "We have a joke about our ice cream machines, but we're not sure it'll work." Womp womp. Even they know.

• 10:58Speaker 02

  When I reached out to them about it, they didn't try to kind of deny that their machines are broken all the time. They just kind of apologized and said, "We're working on it."

• 11:08Dan Pashman?

  We did reach out to McDonald's for comment on this story. They told us they wanted customers to be able to get soft-serve, quote, "Whenever the craving strikes." And that there was a dedicated team of people at McDonald's trying to improve the ice cream machine's performance. But the fact that this machine breaks down so often is only part of the problem. There's a bigger issue, which is really at the crux of this story. The machine doesn't just break a lot, it's also very difficult to fix it on your own.

• 11:32Speaker 02

  A lot of these places, the manager does try to fix it, or they have their own kind of technical person on staff who maybe like, you know, oversees a whole collection of restaurants. But the fact is that Taylor doesn't make it easy.

• 11:47Dan Pashman?

  So let's say the daily pasteurization heat treatment fails, and you want to try to fix this thing yourself. As Melissa and Jeremy learned, the machine won't always tell you what's wrong. First, to get even basic information, you need to enter a code.

• 12:00Speaker 03

  You need to open up a menu, which requires multiple button presses. And the buttons don't have names, so if you're not experienced, you wouldn't even know that, hey, I need to press the snowflake five times and hit the shake button to select. It's just too cryptic.

• 12:18Dan Pashman?

  It sounds like, it's like video game codes.

• 12:20Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 12:20Dan Pashman?

  Like up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, start. It's like how you check the temperature.

• 12:25Speaker 04

  That's right. You need some like old-school Street Fighter skills. The game controller to get in that menu.

• 12:31Dan Pashman?

  Right, right. That basic code does come with the owner's manual. But then there's the secret code, the first hooked Andy on this story. The code that lets you access more detailed information about why the machine isn't working. At the time, this code wasn't readily available to the machine's owners. So the restaurant franchisees who shelled out about 18 grand for these things, and who stand to lose hundreds or even thousands in sales when it breaks down, they didn't have access to this code. The people who did? Taylor and their licensed distributors.

• 13:00Speaker 02

  Most of the time, the franchisees end up calling out the repair guy, who generally comes from a Taylor distributor. These sort of licensed, approved companies that give Taylor a cut of the service fees that they charge the restaurant owners. So indirectly, Taylor is making a lot of money from the fact that their machines are broken all the time. In fact, I've seen some numbers from Taylor that 25% of their revenue at one point came from maintenance.

• 13:34Dan Pashman?

  Back in 2021, when we were first working on this story, we reached out to Taylor and its parent company, Middleby, with a long list of questions. They didn't respond to multiple requests for comment. We reached out to them again just a few weeks ago. A Middleby spokesperson wrote back, FYI, I'm not responding to this quote unquote "media inquiry" regarding McDonald's and Taylor. Like the franchise owners, Jeremy and Melissa often found themselves having to call Taylor technicians to repair their machines.

• 13:59Speaker 03

  We experienced this over and over and over again, and it was costly. So that's really when our focus shifted. We realized we had to do something to the ice cream machine so that we actually had a functioning operational business.

• 14:17Dan Pashman?

  Melissa and Jeremy bought little cameras and put them inside the Frobot so they could see what was going on. According to Melissa, Taylor knew the company was working on hacks like this to improve the performance of the Frobot.

• 14:28Speaker 03

  So we had emailed them asking, hey, do you have any method for us to monitor these machines remotely? And they said, no. We asked a few more questions and they said, you can go ahead and proceed with this, but we just can't help you.

• 14:45Dan Pashman?

  Jeremy and Melissa built a device and wrote code that allowed them to monitor the Taylor machine's activity and access that hidden data about how it was running. There was an issue in the machine. The device would send an alert to an app on their phone to let them know and would let them control the Froyo machine remotely to fix the problem. It could even detect and fix some issues in advance, preventing costly shutdowns.

• 15:08Dan Pashman?

  Eventually, Melissa and Jeremy realized something. This connected device, on its own, had the potential to be way bigger than Frobot. I mean, they had eight Frobots, but there are 13,000 McDonald's franchises out there, not to mention all the other fast food places that use other Taylor machines. So they made a big decision. They abandoned Frobot. In 2019, they launched their ice cream machine device as a standalone product called Kitch.

• 15:33Speaker 03

  We started approaching people on LinkedIn. We started driving to different restaurants and approaching the staff there. And slowly, we were building a customer base. And once we went to these trade shows for Burger King and McDonald's, it really took off from there. Hundreds of devices were going out the door.

• 15:54Dan Pashman?

  Andy Greenberg confirms that Kitch was a hit.

• 15:57Speaker 02

  I spoke to a bunch of franchisees. They loved it. I mean, one McDonald's restaurant owner described to me how one of their restaurants just had an ice cream machine that was just down constantly, like multiple times a month, I think. And after he got Kitch, it was only when he figured out that it was just that like some McDonald's employee was just putting like a little too much of the dairy mixture into one of the hoppers, you know? And just like an inch or two too much of that mixture was enough to cause the heat treatment to fail. Kitch detected that and fixed it. Now, the guy is like kind of obsessed with Kitch. And he tells me that every morning at 5:30 a.m., like the first thing he does when he wakes up is like look at his Kitch readings remotely for all of his restaurants.

• 16:42Dan Pashman?

  As we mentioned, Jeremy and Melissa say they had a good relationship with Taylor. Taylor had been supportive of Frobot, and the company knew the couple was developing this device that would go in their machines and allow remote control to make Frobot work better. But when Jeremy and Melissa started selling Kitch on its own, directly to restaurant franchisees, that's when they say their relationship with Taylor changed. They started to suspect that Taylor was trying to get their hands on a Kitch, and even that they'd enlisted private investigators to help.

• 17:10Speaker 02

  And that's kind of the time when it's like, ooh, yeah, this is like explicitly, things have gone bad.

• 17:22Dan Pashman?

  Coming up, Melissa turns into an investigator herself. Stick around.

• 17:36Speaker 01

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• 17:47Dan Pashman?

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• 18:49Dan Pashman?

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• 20:18Dan Pashman?

  It's the best way to support the show. Welcome back to the Sporkful. I'm Dan Pashman, and spots are filling up fast for all of my trips with Culinary Backstreets. Going back to Rome and Puglia this fall, and one spot just opened up for a single traveler. Join us, it's always a super fun group, we always have single travelers with us, you'll have a blast. And then February 2027, Mexico City. There's gonna be a mole deep dive, a tacos al pastor crawl, it's gonna be incredible. And that one, too, only has one spot left. And even looking as far away as fall 2027, the next Rome and Puglia pasta tour is half sold out, so please get on it.

• 20:59Dan Pashman?

  Go to culinarybackstreets.com/sporkful for all the details on all the trips. And if there's not space for one, get them at email list, because if someone cancels, they'll email you. Again, culinarybackstreets.com/sporkful. Now, back to our story. With their pivot to their ice cream machine hacking device, Kitch, Jeremy and Melissa thought they were really on to something. But the move seemed to be affecting their relationship with Taylor. One of their first orders for a Kitch actually came from Taylor. Before they fulfilled it, Melissa and Jeremy say they messaged Taylor to ask what they planned to do with it. The couple say Taylor never responded, so they canceled the order. Then, more strange orders started coming in.

• 21:38Speaker 03

  It was the summer of 2019, we were getting a bunch of orders that were being shipped to home addresses.

• 21:46Dan Pashman?

  Typical buyers would have the device sent to a restaurant. Melissa says she looked into who lived at the addresses on those orders, and the names on the public records for those properties didn't match the names on the orders. She believed that meant the orders were placed with fake names. But when she looked up the names actually connected with the addresses?

• 22:05Speaker 03

  If I look through LinkedIn, I see someone... Was that name who owns this property claiming that they work at Marksman, which is a IP investigative firm.

• 22:17Dan Pashman?

  Why didn't you want Taylor to get their hands on a Kitch?

• 22:21Speaker 03

  The way they approached it, right? If they had responded to our email and said, hey, here's why we went on to your website to order and didn't contact you. I mean, they had chatted with us on multiple occasions. We shook hands, they had our cell phone numbers. It didn't sit right with us. And then when the private investigators came along and then when their attorney prior to that tried to order one, it seemed like their intentions were not proper.

• 22:52Dan Pashman?

  Melissa and Jeremy were concerned Taylor would try to use the technology in Kitch without the couple's permission to create their own version of the device. Despite these worries, things were going really well for Kitch. Their sales were doubling every quarter. Then they got their big break when they heard from a guy named Tyler Gamble. He's the head of the equipment team for the National Supply Leadership Council. It's an influential group of McDonald's franchisees. He wanted to try Kitch in his restaurants. If he liked it and started spreading the word about it, that would be huge. Melissa and Jeremy sent Tyler Gamble four Kitch devices to try out. Reporter Andy Greenberg says just a few months later.

• 23:30Speaker 02

  He goes off to the McDonald's franchisee conference and proceeds to give this like minute-long infomercial for Kitch where he really recommends it. Jeremy and Melissa are at this conference. They're sitting at their sales booth, watching the stream of this speech live.

• 23:46Speaker 04

  We were ecstatic. We were really happy. We were like, with this awesome kind of review and nod from Tyler Gamble. We thought, okay, we're going to be in every McDonald's. It's only a matter of months now and it was super exciting.

• 24:01Speaker 02

  It's just after that that the axe falls.

• 24:06Speaker 02

  Just shortly after, McDonald's sends an email out to, I believe, every franchisee that says, more or less, "Don't use Kitch." "It will void the warranty on your Taylor ice cream machine." "It breaches the confidential information on the machine." They don't mean the restaurant owner's confidential information or the customer's information. They mean Taylor's confidential information on the machine that restaurant owners bought from Taylor. And then the kicker is that it can cause serious human injury to technicians or staff in the restaurant. This is kind of like a one-two punch death blow to Kitch.

• 24:47Speaker 02

  I mean, McDonald's franchisees listen to McDonald's Corporation. They know that they're basically dependent on McDonald's, the company, for their livelihoods. So they listen.

• 24:59Dan Pashman?

  The email ends with a bold italic warning. "McDonald's strongly recommends that you remove the Kitch device from all machines and discontinue use."

• 25:08Speaker 03

  That's when we started losing customers. The opportunity for growth in McDonald's completely was decimated. So everything was going well until that point.

• 25:22Dan Pashman?

  We asked McDonald's USA if they were aware of any incidents in which Kitch had caused physical harm. They didn't provide any examples, but they said they were concerned that Kitch's remote operation feature had the potential to injure someone, since it could turn the ice cream machine on while someone else is cleaning, operating, or repairing it. I asked Jeremy and Melissa if that's ever happened, as far as they know.

• 25:40Speaker 04

  No.

• 25:41Speaker 03

  No.

• 25:42Dan Pashman?

  Has anyone ever been hurt because of Kitch, to the best of your knowledge?

• 25:45Speaker 03

  We have zero reported cases of anyone ever being injured because of Kitch. Our machine is certified by Intertek to UL standards. And when you're performing any work on any type of machinery, step one, unplug the equipment.

• 26:06Dan Pashman?

  Coming up, Taylor announces a Kitch competitor, and Jeremy and Melissa smell a rat. Stick around.

• 26:20Dan Pashman?

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• 28:33Dan Pashman?

  Welcome back. The day after McDonald's sent that email to their franchisees warning them to stop using Kitch, Taylor announced they were coming out with their own device to be installed in their ice cream machines called Taylor Shake Sundae Connectivity. It sounded very similar to Kitch. In their statement to us in 2021, McDonald's USA said they were "testing a smart technology that sends realtime texts when the machines aren't working properly, so they can be fixed ASAP. We're committed to getting this right for our customers." McDonald's did not confirm whether or not this was the Taylor Shake Sundae Connectivity, and they didn't respond to a question about how long this smart technology had been in development. Jeremy and Melissa were convinced that Taylor had gotten their hands on a Kitch and used it to make their own version.

• 29:17Dan Pashman?

  Melissa started digging through Kitch records and soon zeroed in on one of Tyler Gamble's Kitch devices. Remember, Tyler is the guy from that influential franchisee group, the one who gave Kitch that great endorsement onstage.

• 29:29Speaker 03

  One of his Kitch devices went offline for about an eight-month period, and he had said that his machine was in the shop. He told us that the device was still attached to the machine, and it was at the Taylor distributor. We noticed that a user that Tyler had invited, named Matt Wilson, we looked into his login information, and we noticed that the IP addresses overlaid with the locations of this Taylor distributor, TFG.

• 30:01Dan Pashman?

  So Tyler had added Matt Wilson as a user on his Kitch account?

• 30:05Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 30:06Dan Pashman?

  And then you traced Matt Wilson and discovered that he, it seems like he has a connection to Taylor distributors?

• 30:14Speaker 03

  It turns out that Matt Wilson is actually Blaine Martin, the owner of TFG.

• 30:21Dan Pashman?

  You sound like, all the names I've heard so far sound like fake names.

• 30:28Dan Pashman?

  So but Tyler Gamble and Blaine, Blaine Martin, those are real people. Matt Wilson is the fake person.

• 30:33Speaker 03

  That's correct.

• 30:34Dan Pashman?

  So Matt Wilson turns out to be Blaine Martin.

• 30:36Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 30:38Dan Pashman?

  Who is what now?

• 30:39Speaker 03

  He is the owner of TFG, which is a large tailor distributor.

• 30:45Dan Pashman?

  And how are you able to confirm that Matt Wilson was Blaine Martin?

• 30:49Speaker 03

  Because the cell phone number listed on his Kitch account is the same phone number on Blaine Martin's business card.

• 30:58Dan Pashman?

  Which you have.

• 30:59Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 31:00Dan Pashman?

  When you connected those dots, what was that moment?

• 31:02Speaker 03

  I mean, it was shocking. It was disturbing. We had met him before, you know, we shook hands. So I recall Jeremy was a bit nauseous at the time because, you know, you can't believe that this is even happening. I mean, it's unreal.

• 31:20Dan Pashman?

  Did you guys have one of those walls in your room with all the thumbtacks and the strings attaching them?

• 31:24Speaker 03

  You know, we did.

• 31:25Speaker 04

  You have no idea. Yeah, we're.

• 31:28Dan Pashman?

  Really? Did you?

• 31:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, we put everything up on the wall and tried to piece it together.

• 31:33Speaker 04

  There's yarn everywhere.

• 31:36Speaker 04

  They underestimated Melissa's Sherlock Holmes ability and she just ate private investigators for lunch.

• 31:43Dan Pashman?

  At any point, Melissa, did you use the phrase, "I've hacked into the mainframe"?

• 31:50Dan Pashman?

  If I were you, I would say that once in a while, even if it's not true, which just sounds.

• 31:53Speaker 03

  I'll use that this week.

• 31:54Dan Pashman?

  All right.

• 32:04Dan Pashman?

  We reached out to Blaine Martin in 2021. His title is managing partner of TFG. He declined to comment due to ongoing litigation. That year, Jeremy and Melissa did file a lawsuit against Tyler Gamble, the tailor distributor TFG, where Blaine Martin works, and Taylor itself. According to the suit, Tyler Gamble signed Kitch's user agreement, which prohibits sharing any of the device's proprietary information. The suit alleged he did just that and that these companies acquired and used Kitch's trade secrets without permission. We also reached out to Tyler Gamble in 2021, but he didn't respond to our request for comment. Reporter Andy Greenberg did get one email from Tyler early on before the lawsuit, in which Tyler said he saw himself as, quote, "Kitch's biggest advocate."

• 32:46Dan Pashman?

  Even after all this, there was still one issue I wanted to clarify with Melissa and Jeremy. So you're suing Taylor because you're alleging that they got a hold of your technology improperly and are using your trade secrets. But is there a way in which you kind of did the same thing with the Taylor machines? Like you bought the you bought the machines, you got a hold of the machines and another pretense of doing Frobot, then use the machines to build your own device that that hacks into the Taylor machines? So is there a way that you're kind of doing the same thing you're accusing them of doing?

• 33:21Speaker 03

  Well, they provided permission for us to do what we were doing. And also, all of our customers do sign a trial agreement and they also agree to the terms on our website, which state that they will not share our trade secrets and that they certainly would not give a physical device to a competitor. But that's not the case when you purchase a Taylor machine. There is no terms of service.

• 33:50Dan Pashman?

  But in that sense, like the permission that they gave you was to work was to to hack into their machines for a specific purpose, which is one that they were on board with, which was Frobot. And then when your business became dangerous to them, to their business model, that's different from what they gave you permission for.

• 34:09Speaker 03

  Same software, same product, one's just not sold with a expensive metal enclosure.

• 34:17Dan Pashman?

  Okay, so in your eyes, that was not any kind of like a breach on your part?

• 34:26Speaker 03

  Certainly not.

• 34:28Dan Pashman?

  Back in 2021, McDonald's said they were testing their new technology in several dozen restaurants in the US, and they expected to have it available nationwide in the following months. Meanwhile, Kitch was still being used in a few hundred restaurants, most of which were McDonald's, even though McDonald's told their franchisees to stop using it.

• 34:43Speaker 04

  Our goal was to fix the ice cream machine, and we did fix the ice cream machine.

• 34:47Dan Pashman?

  They just happened to be making a fix for a company that didn't want their solution.

• 34:50Speaker 04

  And so you can create the best kind of modern futuristic kitchen, but if someone doesn't want it, then it might be too hard to change.

• 35:04Dan Pashman?

  I had these conversations with Jeremy, Melissa, and reporter Andy Greenberg in 2021. Since then, there have been some developments. Less than a year after we spoke with them, Jeremy and Melissa sued McDonald's. Previously, they'd only sued Taylor, TFG, Blaine Martin, and Tyler Gamble. But this time, they were going for the big dogs. They claimed tortious interference of contract, false advertising, trade libel, intentional and negligent interference with business expectancy, and deceptive trade practices. Andy reported they were asking for $900 million in damages. While the lawsuit was ongoing, Taylor told customers they were going to upgrade their machines to include connectivity features, but they didn't respond to our request for comment on whether any of those upgrades were ever made. As for the lawsuit,

• 35:49Dan Pashman?

  McDonald's and Kitch settled for an unknown amount. Kitch as a company no longer exists. We tried to reach Jeremy and Melissa for comment this year, but they didn't respond. According to LinkedIn, Melissa now works as the lawyer for a tech firm. Jeremy's profile doesn't list any current employment. We also recently sent McDonald's a list of questions, including about the current state of their ice cream machines and any connectivity upgrades they or Taylor have made to them. They didn't respond. But according to that website, McBroken.com, as I record this, 16% of McDonald's ice cream machines are currently down. The other day, it was 22%. So it's roughly the same as when Andy Greenberg started looking into this years ago.

• 36:41Dan Pashman?

  My thanks to Andy Greenberg from Wired. We'll link to his various pieces about Kitch in our show notes. Next week on the show, I talk with writer Jason Diamond. He writes a lot about food. He's also struggled with ADHD, depression, and housing insecurity. When he became a parent, his latest struggle became about something that would fundamentally change his relationship with food: GLP-1s. That's next week. While I wait for that one, check out last week's episode when I visit the clam capital of America and the restaurant where they claim to have invented fried clams. That one's up now. This show is produced by me along with senior producer

• 37:14Speaker 01

  Emma Morgenstern.

• 37:15Dan Pashman?

  And producer Andre Sojera. This episode was edited by

• 37:18Speaker 01

  Tracy Samuelson.

• 37:19Dan Pashman?

  Our technical director is Jared O'Connell. Music help from Black Label Music. The Sporkful is a production of Sirius XM Podcasts. Our executive producer is Camille Stanley. Until next time, I'm Dan Pashman.

• 37:29Speaker 01

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