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McDonald's Hires Project Ara Design Team To Reinvent the Drinking Straw (fastcodesign.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the how-it's-made dept.

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.

13 of 102 comments (clear)

  1. My impressions... by Baron_Yam · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re: My impressions... by Baron_Yam · · Score: 2

      The more I think about it (BTW, thanks for adding 'gedanken experiment' to my vocabulary!), the more it seems like there's no practical solution to the problem of a straw that draws evenly from two distinct layers of liquid.

      The design in this ad campaign, for instance, would simply draw from the bottom preferentially over the end. You might mitigate that by having the hole sizes increase as you go along the straw, but you're never going to have a simple object that will pull anywhere near evenly from two sources as the levels change.

      But how complex would it need to be? As best I can figure without expending too much skull sweat, you're going to need a float moderating the position of a collapsing portion of a double straw to keep two distinct intake ports at the bottom of their liquid layers as the distance between the two layer floors decreases.

      Or, if you're willing to involve the glass as part of your straw mechanism, you could have a non-tapering glass and put a physical barrier between the two layers, with the top straw attached to its upper side and the lower straw passing through. You're still left with uneven straw lengths, though.

      Aw crap... I'm going to be up all night thinking about this stupid straw problem...

    2. Re:My impressions... by Baron_Yam · · Score: 2

      >Why go to so much effort, expense and time to design a straw for such a crappy, stupid drink?

      It's an advertising campaign, not an actual serious attempt at an engineering solution.

      And a real engineer may never even have heard of this until the ad campaign was released - after all, there's no way that straw actually does what it's presented as having been designed to do.

      It's actually very effective if you look at the real problem of 'how do we get people to pay attention to our ad campaign?', but that's not really an engineering challenge.

    3. Re: My impressions... by lobiusmoop · · Score: 4, Funny

      You just _know_ the CEO of Burger King is thinking 'Fuck everything, we're doing a triple straw."

      --
      "I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
  2. This sucks by jfdavis668 · · Score: 4, Funny

    I realize it is supposed to suck. The first topic that I can actually respond correctly to this way.

  3. Details about the straw by MobyDisk · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

  4. Re:Irony by stephanruby · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.

  5. Priceless by DontBeAMoran · · Score: 2

    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
  6. Fail to remember history by dbIII · · Score: 2

    "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.

  7. Relevant XKCD by jfdavis668 · · Score: 5, Funny

    https://xkcd.com/1095/

  8. Lucky few? by guises · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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."

  9. Re:Irony by codeButcher · · Score: 2

    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.
  10. Re:Irony by Hognoxious · · Score: 2

    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."