The McDonald’s ice cream machine is notoriously fickle. Like an Italian sports car, it’s efficient and powerful, but temperamental and fragile. Two entrepreneurs invented a device to improve them. Then things got weird
last August that “we have a joke about our soft serve machine but we're worried it won't work,” a self-own that received nearly 29,000 likes.
So Nelson and O’Sullivan, then based in the Washington, DC, area, began to develop what they called the Frobot: A bulky enclosure built like a closet around a Taylor frozen yogurt machine, with its own TV-sized touchscreen interface and credit card reader. In other words, they set out to condense the frozen yogurt store into a single autonomous appliance. They hoped to install their Frobot in public spaces, turn it on, and let it extrude revenue.
O’Sullivan and one of Frobot’s contract engineers moved to Shenzhen in late 2016. They got to work in Hax’s warehouse space, above one of the city’s famous electronics markets, trying to reverse-engineer Taylor’s ice cream machines to understand and intercept all of their internal communications. Huang remembers O’Sullivan being more business-minded than technical, but was impressed with the clarity of the Frobot-filled future he imagined.
At one point while in Shenzhen, O’Sullivan wrote to a contact at Taylor to ask for advice about a technical question they were stuck on. The Taylor executive wrote back that “if you want to tap into the controls or sniff data packets it will need to be without the assistance of Taylor at this time due to our current security policies.”
O’Sullivan and Nelson’s first business was Frobot, a fully automated froyo dispenser built around a Taylor ice cream machine. But the Taylor machine was so finicky and fragile that they gave up and focused on a device to fix its flaws.As their problems mounted, they went so far as to mount Nest security cams in the Frobot cabinets to capture video of what might be going wrong inside.
In the fall of 2019, as they began to penetrate the baroque inner workings of the McDonald’s world, O’Sullivan and Nelson were stunned to learn that most restaurant owners had never accessed or even heard of the service menu that unlocked variables like the temperature of the machine’s hoppers or the glycol used for its ultra-fussy pasteurization process. “It was a real ‘aha’ moment,” Nelson says.
McD Truth confides that Kytch still rarely manages to prevent ice cream machines from breaking. But without Kytch, restaurants’ harried staff don't even notify owners nine out of 10 times when the ice cream machine is down. Now, at the very least, they get an email alert with a diagnosis of the problem. “That is the luxury,” McD Truth writes. “Kytch is a very good device.”
Around the same time, Taylor sent Nelson and O’Sullivan a cease-and-desist letter telling them to stop using Taylor’s branding in their displays at food industry trade shows. The days of their Frobot friendship had officially ended. Then he essentially gave Kytch a free, minute-long infomercial. “I’ve had the opportunity to have their devices in my restaurants over the last several months,” Gamble told the crowd. “To be clear, this is not a McDonald’s-approved piece of equipment, and the suppliers are not yet fully on board with it,” Gamble continued.
As McDonald’s restaurant owners canceled hundreds of subscriptions, trials, and commitments to install Kytch over the next months, the startup’s sales projections evaporated. Finding new customers became impossible. Their sole, flabbergasted salesperson quit. All the franchisees agreed, too, that the notion that Kytch could cause harm to humans was far-fetched, if not impossible: Kytch’s commands don’t generally affect moving parts, and Taylor’s own manual tells anyone servicing or disassembling the device to unplug it before working on it.
After their business cratered, O’Sullivan and Nelson began looking up the logins on Kytch’s website and saw that one of the user profiles associated with Gamble's machine in the shop had been deleted a couple of months after the fateful McDonald’s email in November. That deleted user was named Matt Wilson.
Just as Gamble was praising Kytch on the conference stage in October, Nelson and O’Sullivan now allege, he had also been helping Taylor as it engineered their company’s downfall—the coldest betrayal of all.O’Sullivan now hope, is a dish best served—well, through a long and elaborate legal process.
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