If you’ve ever felt the painful disappointment of driving up to a McDonald’s drive through to fix an intense ice cream craving, only to be told the ice cream machine isn’t working, you would understand the motivation this YouTuber had when making the following documentary.
YouTuber and filmmaker, Johnny Harris, released a documentary last week to investigate this painful modern life mystery: why McDonald’s ice cream machines ‘are always broken’.
Johnny found that there were actually multiple reasons behind the strange phenomena of broken ice cream makers at McDonald’s – and there’s also a reason it never seems to happen at other fast food outlets.
Credit: YouTube/Johnny Harris
The documenary also introduced a very interesting website, McBroken, which uses a bot to track working ice cream machines at McDonald’s restaurants across the United States.
The software engineer behind McBroken, Rashiq Zahid, said he was inspired after an incident in the summer when he went to pick up a McSundae from a McDonald’s in Berlin, only to find the machine was broken. The site on UnBroken displays a map of the US with every McDonald’s restaurant marked with either a green or a red dot to indicate if the ice cream machine is working. According to Rashiq, the website collects this information by placing an online order at each McDonald’s, every 30 minutes.
Back to Johnny’s quest for truth – According to reports, the reason McDonald’s ice cream machines seem to be broken so often is due to scheduled machine cleaning cycle which involves two long and labour-intensive processes. could actually be in part down to the cleaning cycles of the machines. They have two separate cleaning processes, with one being a labour-intensive 11-step clean that involves sanitising the whole machine, including removing seven of the parts.
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