Six months ago, a small startup called Kytch sued Taylor, the multi-billion dollar producer of McDonald’s famous broken ice cream machine. For years, Kytch has been selling a small device that hacks those ice cream machines, allowing McDonald’s restaurant owners to better diagnose their illnesses and make them work more reliably — just to discovered, according to Kytch’s legal complaint, that Taylor conspired to clone their equipment and sabotage its business.
Now, Kytch’s lawsuit reveals another side of that story: Taylor’s own internal communications. Recently released court documents appear to show that Taylor executives viewed Kytch as a business threat and attempted to copy the device’s features into a competing product. — all while still not really curing your McDonald’s ice cream headache.
During the discovery of the lawsuit Kytch filed in May, Taylor was forced to make public more than 800 pages of emails and internal presentations mentioning her approach to Kytch. They point out that, contrary to Taylor’s previous claims to WIRED, the company has closely examined and sought to mimic Kytch’s specific features. The emails also show that at some point, McDonald’s, not Taylor, led efforts to prevent restaurants from using Kytch’s facilities.
Kytch co-founder Melissa Nelson said: “There was a concerted effort to not only take and clone our device and follow through with everything we were doing, but also when it hit a critical point. , really put us out of business.”
The battle that hasn’t taken place begins with Kytch’s attempt, which began in 2019, to build and sell a device that can intercept data on a Taylor C602 ice cream machine used by McDonald’s franchisees. . McDonald’s ice cream machines break down about 10% of its restaurants, based on data collected by ice cream machine tracking service McBroken, and McDonald’s franchisees tell WIRED that better diagnostics can lead to faster fixes. (Some areas typically have an even higher rate of no-order machines: McBroken found that McDonald’s ice cream machines in New York City were down 20 to 40 percent of the time compared to last week alone.)
McDonald’s responded to Kytch’s growing sales by sending out a memo in the fall of 2020 to all franchisees warning them not to use the device, saying it posed a risk to physical safety, void the Taylor machine’s warranty and access its “proprietary data. The memo recommends upgrading to a new internet-connected device called the Taylor Shake Sundae Connectivity. Even now, that next-gen machine has yet to hit the market beyond a limited test. Kytch described McDonald’s message as “defamatory”, claiming that it destroyed the business and left franchisees without a fix for their ice cream machines that kept freezing. .
Kytch responded by suing Taylor in May, as well as a Taylor distributor named TFG and a McDonald’s franchisee named Tyler Gamble, who allegedly granted Taylor and TFG access to the store. Kytch’s device. The lawsuit alleges that by doing so, Gamble breached Kytch’s contract, and that Taylor misappropriated the company’s trade secrets. Co-Founder of Kytch told WIRED last spring that they believe Taylor went so far as to hire a private investigative firm to attempt to surreptitiously purchase a Kytch device in an effort to analyze and replicate it.
