The breakdown rate of McDonald's ice cream machines in the United States has been documented in real time since 2020 by an independent website, McBroken.com, which automatically queries the brand's ordering app to find out whether the McFlurry is available in each restaurant — and regularly shows unavailability rates above 10% of restaurants.
The machines in question, made by Taylor Commercial Foodservice (a subsidiary of the Middleby group), have a reputation for being complex to maintain: a cleaning and pasteurisation cycle lasting several hours, and faults that only a Taylor-approved technician is supposed to be able to diagnose — in return for costly maintenance contracts for franchisees.
Kytch, the device that promised to crack the mystery
In 2019, two engineers, Jeremy O'Sullivan and Melissa Nelson, brought Kytch to market: a connected device that plugs into the Taylor machine, reads its diagnostic data in real time and alerts the franchisee before a breakdown — or tells them how to fix it themselves, without a paid service call. Several hundred franchised restaurants adopted it.
November 2020: McDonald's asks franchisees to unplug Kytch
In November 2020, McDonald's Corporation sent its franchisees an internal memo asking them to stop using Kytch devices, citing a risk to user safety — the brand raised the possibility that an employee could be exposed to a risk of serious injury when working on a live machine. Kytch disputes this presentation and describes it, in its complaint, as a smear campaign intended to push it out of the market.
Two lawsuits, the same ground: trade secrets
Kytch first sued Taylor and its parent company Middleby before a Californian court, in 2021: the company claims that Taylor obtained a Kytch device to study it, before launching its own competing remote diagnostic device. Taylor denies having used any trade secret, explaining that the features claimed by Kytch had already been made public by the company itself in its own marketing materials.
In March 2022, Kytch widened the front: it filed a 900-million-dollar complaint against McDonald's before a federal court in Delaware, accusing it of having orchestrated, with Taylor, the spreading of misleading safety allegations to push it out of the market before launching a competing device — which several American media outlets, using the wording of the complaint, summed up as a “repair racket”.
This article documents ongoing proceedings. The allegations summarised here are those of the parties, as reported by the press and public court documents; none had been ruled on the merits at the date of publication.
Where the case stands
In the Californian proceedings, the court subsequently refused Kytch an injunction seeking to block a new connectivity feature rolled out by Taylor, finding that nothing showed it incorporated a trade secret belonging to Kytch. The federal proceedings against McDonald's are still at the pre-trial stage.
The episode sheds light, from an unusual angle, on a central question of the franchise agreement: the head of the network imposes its suppliers and equipment standards, in the name of brand uniformity — the same lever which, elsewhere in this case file, allows it to set the fees, rents and standards of its franchisees.