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McDonald's Hires Project Ara Design Team To Reinvent the Drinking Straw (fastcodesign.com)
An anonymous reader writes: McDonald's has hired the creators of Google's Project Ara to reinvent the drinking straw. Their new invention, the "Suction Tube for Reverse Axial Withdrawal" (STRAW for short), is a J-shaped device that allows the user to drink both layers of the company's dual-layer Chocolate Shamrock shake simultaneously, receiving an optimal mixture of chocolate and, um, shamrock. McDonald's announced the new product at a Facebook live event yesterday, which included a keynote by McDonald's Senior Director of Menu Innovation Darci Forrest, a Silicon-Valley-style panel moderated by Austin Evans, and interviews with engineers from NK Labs and JACE. Computational fluid dynamics simulations, 3D printing, and extensive real-world testing (drinking shakes) were required to get the design ready for its eventual unveiling. McDonald's is producing a limited first run of 2000 of the straws for distribution at restaurants across the U.S. "My first reaction was, that doesn't seem too hard. We could have a double straw -- one longer, one shorter. No problem," says Seth Newburg, principal engineer and managing partner at NK Labs, which teamed up with JACE Design on the STRAW. "Then we immediately thought, once you get halfway down, one straw is going to start sucking air... It's one of those things that seems so simple, but as we got into it there were a lot more issues exposed. It turned out to present quite a few engineering and scientific challenges." NK Labs and JACE Design were the two companies who also worked on Project Ara together, the Google initiative to build a phone with interchangeable modules for various components like cameras and batteries. Unfortunately, the plans for Project Ara were scrapped late last year.
First: That's incredibly stupid.
Second: Oh, wait, they actually came up with a clever engineering solution to the problem presented to them.
Third: Which would be far more efficiently dealt with by just blending the two drinks together from the start.
Still, the design of the straw is kind of neat even if the reason for developing it is stupid.
I realize it is supposed to suck. The first topic that I can actually respond correctly to this way.
Thanks for reminding me that it's time to make my once-a-year trip to the golden arches for the somewhat bizarre minty goodness that is the shamrock shake.
Sounds like McDonalds is sucking air, right enough!
The new straw runs Windows IoT embedded on an ARM Cortex A53 with 1GB of RAM. The straw contains 2 Festo 334-T3 pressure regulators that update 64,000 times per second to maintain an even flow of chocolate and shamrock. The embedded 802.11N connectivity will inform McDonald's immediately when your drink is done so it can automatically charge your credit card for another.
This instance(advertisement) was probably paid for by the advertising department, but this level is where most innovation occurs and where people make a lot of money, not in developing high end super parallel processing servers. Imagine life before wheels on suitcases. Then wonder why it took them so long to get them.
Any of the McDonald's employees out there able to step up and explain what was in the need-my-glasses press release this morning? We appear to have a CHOCOLATE Shamrock Shake this year....
This straws! ("Suck" was a banned word there...)
The article was a response to the press release issued today, and has a clear "THIS MAKES NO SENSE!" type of statement in this.
I can just imagine how the conversation went:
CEO: Why is no one buying our shakes?
Market Research: People say that our shakes are so disgusting that they can't even finish them. Perhaps now would be the time to start using better ingredients for a few pennies more per shake?
CEO: That's none sense. If people can't finish their shake, it must because of the straw, not because of the taste. Besides, our customers are like stupid little kids. If we show them a cool new design for our straws, they'll buy the shake just to get the straw.
McDonald's doing a real commercial which is a parody of Apple's videos with Jony Ive.
Now THAT takes courage. On top of that, their new Suction Tube for Reverse Axial Withdrawal is a real innovation.
#DeleteFacebook
If the McDonald's CEO ever tried to eat at McDonald's he'd realize in a hurry it's because the machine is a pain to clean so the workers they can hire for minimum wage just say its broken because they have no real incentive to give two fucks if someone buys a shake or not and don't want to deal with the added hassle of cleaning the machine again.
"black-and-tan" "Shamrock Shake"?
Beyond tacky (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_and_Tans)
Those who fail to remember history are destined to really piss some people off - in this case in Ireland.
To some people it would be like having a joke of Ronald McDonald in blackface.
Unfortunately? Project Ara was a ridiculous idea.
Wouldn't that be a job for a bull?
'All beef' means all beef and beef byproducts. What you're looking for is USDA prime.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
https://xkcd.com/1095/
Why not mix the shake up in whatever proportion desired and just use a normal straw?
if I'd gotten here soon enough I would have modded you up as insightful rather than funny. McDonald's shakes are gross - I don't understand how they sell any. Maybe the only people who buy them are those that have never had a real milkshake.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
The video (which, by the way, was pretty decent for a commercial) says that only a "lucky few" get to experience the STRAW. ... What? What the hell is that? I was briefly sold on trying one of these out, but there's no way I'm going to trek to McDonalds and buy one of these shakes only to get stiffed on the one reason I was buying the shake in the first place. That's like buying a Happy Meal and not getting a toy. You just don't do it. That's a sad meal.
I realize that the point of this is to generate buzz, but what's the point of buzz if you're going to follow it up with, "Ha ha, just kidding. We're not actually going to sell you the thing we're advertising."
Cleaning machines? And mess up the product's nice and unique uhmmm.... bouquet?
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
As a non-US, non-CA, non-IE and non-McD denizen, I am still puzzled about the nature of this "shamrock" component of the drink even after reading the Wikipedia article.
And can someone explain to me why one would want to go to McD to buy sham-anything while the real thing is to be had for next to nothing, and probably better tasting?
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
just sell me food that qualifies as food please
I don't think that's included in McDonald's business plan.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
We'll make great pets
Candlelight dinner at McDonalds? Anyone remember this one? I remember them trying to his out in the late 80's and my Mom and I just bust out laughing reading the table mats thinking "Is this a joke?"
Or who can forget the "Make it Bacon!" campaign? They own the trademark. I can't find something to show it but McDonalds was test-driving a thing where you could add bacon to anything for a small extra fee. I used to be out on the road a lot and a buddy of mine and I rolled up to a McDonalds drive thru circa 1999 and were like "WTF?" I'm pretty sure it was in a more rural area.
We'll make great pets
Perhaps what would be truly innovative is to listen to Common F. Sense and make a shake by mixing up all the ingredients equally for humans to consume it the same way we've been doing for the last century.
Boy, nothing quite like humans coming together to find solutions without problems. Talk about one of those jobs you leave off your resume...
I don't get on with dairy so I've never had one, but is it true that they supply forks on request?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
For their stupid St. Patrick's Day shake. Is that even a holiday?
Apparently not an engineering grad.
MSM-UMR-MST
and to think, these engineers could have been spending their time doing something so mundane and pointless, like saving the world or improving everyday peoples' lives. Instead, the beneficent forward thinkers at McDonalds have showered upon them the blessing of using their extraordinary abilities and scarce resources to design a straw!
Mmm... lactobacillus....
IMO the straw went downhill not due to a change in its own design but due to a change in the design of the paper wrapper which has become too tight to provide any fun. I long for a return of straw wrappers that are loose enough to remove one end and shoot it across the room or scrunch it up to make a caterpillar that would "grow" when drops of liquid were dropped on them. Ah, the good old days!
How much engineering do you really think the space pen took? From this page
"A common urban legend states that, faced with the fact that ball-point pens would not write in zero-gravity, NASA spent a large amount of money to develop a pen that would write in the conditions experienced during spaceflight (the result purportedly being the Fisher Space Pen), while the Soviet Union took the simpler and cheaper route of just using pencils. The Fisher Space Pen was actually developed independently and privately in the 1960s, NASA later purchasing 400 of the pens at $6 each. The Soviets followed as well."
At any rate, if a company wants to spend the money to develop a space pen or a new straw, why the fuck do you care? How does it harm you?
Enigma
Norville: [to Amy] Now let me ask you a question: Would an imbecile come up with this?
[shows Amy a picture of a circle]
Norville: You know, for kids.
Well no you have to employ the people that don't want to work also. And if they demand $15/hr you better pay it or you're a racist asshole!
...you could simply mix the two flavours together and use a standard straw, the only difference being the two level shake would be a single chocolaty color
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon