This episode contains explicit language.
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.
Oh, man.
I can't actually think of a better one offhand than this story, than Jeremy O'Sullivan and his whole McDonald's conspiracy theory.
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.
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 18000 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 machine's data.
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 in these initial text messages going further.
He tells me, quote unquote, we've learned some crazy secrets about these machines.
And I was sort of like, well, we'll see.
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 fro-yo 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.
So if you walk into a frozen yogurt store, it's usually 1,500 square feet.
And they're 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.
And so we're like, hmm, here's Jeremy.
If we shrink the store and the experience around this machine, we can drop this machine into a mall.
This machine would become kind of untethered if we could protect it and brand it.
Their business idea?
A Froyo vending machine.
No cashier, no storefront.
Just take a Froyo 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 Froyo machine to play with.
And when we looked at the brands, the main manufacturer, the most popular, was Taylor.
Same exact brand that was at McDonald's, Burger King, In-N-Out.
So we purchased a used Taylor machine off of Craigslist.
And that's how we got started.
We bought it from Mr. Florida in 1979.
There's this guy who owned a gym in Tampa, Florida.
And he bought a frozen yogurt machine for his gym.
It was a C708, is that right?
C706.
And do you remember how much it cost?
It was like $4,000, $3,500 in that range.
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 50000, they finally got a fro-bot up and running.
So Melissa, do you remember the first time that you ordered yourself a fro-yo from your very first fro-bot?
I do.
I think the machine might have overheated.
But yes, 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.
It was exciting to see it work.
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.
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 tailoring machines weren't 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 tailoring machines started giving them real problems.
We just had so many issues keeping it operational.
We experienced a lot of downtime.
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.
You forget one O-ring and you're out of business for the day.
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.
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.
I'm picturing like a witch's cauldron, but like filled with fro-yo.
Exactly.
Something very similar.
Something disturbing.
Right.
And when they would come in in the morning open the door to the fruit bot.
You know, the machine was locked out.
There was ice cream everywhere.
And it would just lead to the entire day being wasted.
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.
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 an 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.
You know, it's a meme where there's an original TikTok song.
And tons of YouTube rants like this one.
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.
I mean it has truly become a kind of shorthand for frustration with capitalism, frustration with technology, just frustration in daily life.
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.
And the numbers were kind of staggering.
I mean the overall number would fluctuate anywhere from like 5 to 16 percent 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 oversees a whole collection of restaurants.
But the fact is that Taylor doesn't make it easy.
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.
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.
It sounds like it's like video game codes.
Exactly.
Like up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, start.
It's like how you check the temperature.
That's right.
You need some like old school street fighter skills.
The game controller to get in that.
Right, right.
That basic code does come with the owner's manual, but then there's the secret code that 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.
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 percent of their revenue at one point came from maintenance.
Back in 2021, 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If there was an issue in the machine, the device would send an alert to an app on their phone to let them know.
And it 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.
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 13000 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 Kitsch.
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.
Andy Greenberg confirms the kitsch was a hit.
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.
After he got Kitsch.
It was only when he figured out that it was just that some McDonald's employee was just putting a little too much of the dairy mixture into one of the hoppers.
And just an inch or two too much of that mixture was enough to cause the heat treatment to fail.
Kitsch detected that and fixed it.
Now the guy is like kind of obsessed with kitsch and he tells me that every morning at 530 am the first thing he does when he wakes up is look at his kitsch readings remotely for all of his restaurants.
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 kitsch 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 kitsch, and even that they'd enlisted private investigators to help.
And that's kind of the time when it's like, oh, yeah, this is like explicitly things have gone bad.
Coming up, Melissa turns into an investigator herself.
Stick around.
And now, a delicious word from our sponsors.
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Now back to our story.
With their pivot to their ice cream machine hacking device Kitsch, Jeremy and Melissa thought they were really onto something.
But the move seemed to be affecting their relationship with Taylor.
One of their first orders for a Kitsch actually came from Taylor.
Before they fulfilled it.
Melissa and Jeremy said 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.
It was the summer of 2019.
We were getting a bunch of orders that were being shipped to home addresses.
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.
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.
Why didn't you want Taylor to get their hands on a kitsch?
The way they approached it?
Right if they had responded to our email and said hey, here's why we went onto 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.
Melissa and Jeremy were concerned, Taylor would try to use the technology in Kitsch without the couple's permission, to create their own version of the device.
Despite these worries, things were going really well for Kitsch.
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 Kitsch 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 kitsch devices to try out.
Reporter Andy Greenberg says just a few months later He goes off to the McDonald's franchisee conference and and proceeds to give this minute-long infomercial for Kitsch, 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.
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.
It's just after that that the axe falls.
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 kind of kicker is that it can cause serious human injury to technicians or staff in the restaurant.
This is a kind of like a one-two punch death blow to catch.
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.
The email ends with a bold italic warning.
McDonald's strongly recommends that you remove the Kitsch device from all machines and discontinue use.
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.
We asked McDonald's USA if they were aware of any incidents in which Kitsch had caused physical harm.
They didn't provide any examples, but they said they were concerned that Kitsch'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.
No.
No.
Has anyone ever been hurt because of kitsch, to the best of your knowledge?
We have zero reported cases of anyone ever being injured because of kitsch.
Our machine is certified by Intertech to UL standards.
And when you're performing any work on any type of machinery, step one, unplug the equipment.
Coming up, Taylor announces a kitsch competitor and Jeremy and Melissa smell a rat.
Stick around.
It's time to open up a can of advertisements.
Welcome back.
The day after McDonald's sent that email to their franchisees warning them to stop using Kitsch, Taylor announced they were coming out with their own device to be installed in their ice cream machines, called Taylor Shake.
Sunday Connectivity.
It sounded very similar to Kitsch.
In their statement to us in 2021, McDonald's USA said they were, quote testing a smart technology that sends real-time 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 Sunday 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 kitsch and used it to make their own version.
Melissa started digging through Kitsch records and soon zeroed in on one of Tyler Gamble's Kitsch devices.
Remember, Tyler is the guy from that influential franchisee group, the one who gave Kitsch that great endorsement on stage.
One of his kitsch 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 tailored distributor TFG.
So Tyler had added Matt Wilson as a user on his Kitsch account.
Exactly.
And then you traced Matt Wilson and discover that he it seems like he has a connection to Taylor distributors.
It turns out that Matt Wilson is actually Blaine Martin, the owner of TFG.
All the names I've heard so far sound like fake names.
So, but Tyler Gamble and Blaine Martin, those are real people.
Matt Wilson is the fake person.
That's correct.
So Matt Wilson turns out to be Blaine Martin.
Yes.
Who is what now?
He is the owner of TFG, which is a large Taylor distributor.
And how are you able to confirm that Matt Wilson was Blaine Martin?
Because the cell phone number listed on his Kitsch account is the same phone number on Blaine Martin's business card.
Which you have.
Yes.
When you connected those dots, what was that moment?
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.
Did you guys have one of those walls in your room with all the thumbtacks and the strings attaching them?
You know, we did.
You have no idea.
Yeah.
Really?
Did you?
Yeah.
We put everything up on the wall and tried to piece it together.
There's yarn everywhere.
They underestimated Melissa's Sherlock Holmes ability and she just ate private investigators for lunch.
At any point, Melissa, did you use the phrase I've hacked into the mainframe?
If I were you, I would say that once in a while, even if it's not true.
I'll use that this week.
All right.
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 Taylor distributor TFG, where Blaine Martin works, and Taylor itself.
According to the suit, Tyler Gamble signed Kitsch'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 Kitsch'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 for the lawsuit in which Tyler said he saw himself as quote Kitsch's biggest advocate.
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 machines or got a hold of the machines under the pretense of doing FroBot.
Then use the machines to build your own device 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?
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.
But, in that sense, like the permission that they gave you was 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.
Same software, same product.
One's just not sold with a expensive metal enclosure.
Okay.
So in your eyes, that was not any kind of like a breach on your part?
Certainly not.
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, kitsch 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.
Our goal was to fix the ice cream machine, and we did fix the ice cream machine.
They just happen to be making a fix for a company that didn't want their solution.
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.
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, McDonald's and Kitsch settled for an unknown amount.
Kitsch 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 a 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 McBrokencom, 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.
My thanks to Andy Greenberg from Wired.
We'll link to his various pieces about kitsch 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 you 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 Emma Morgenstern and producer Andre Sohero.
This episode was edited by Tracy Samuelson.
Our technical director is Jared O'Connell.
Music help from Black Label Music.
The Sporkful is a production of Sirius XM Podcast.
Our executive producer is Camille Stanley.
Until next time, I'm Dan Pashman.
And I'm Holly Rosby in Cleveland, Ohio, reminding you to eat more, eat better, and eat more better.
