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McDonald’s announced the release of a limited-edition milkshake straw that was designed for their new Chocolate Shamrock Shake. Only 2,000 of the innovative shake-slurpin’ device were made.
The Irish holiday is just around the corner, which means the famous McDonald’s Shamrock Shakes are back. In early February, the fast food chain announced that the annual limited-time beverage would be returning with four new Shamrock Shake flavors: chocolate, frappe, hot chocolate, and mocha. The Chocolate Shamrock Shake is a complex, layered milkshake, with chocolate on the bottom half and mint on the top, meaning your average straw is not going to do the trick of seamlessly mixing the flavors. McDonald’s would not stand for this, so they hired a team of aerospace and robotic engineers to craft a solution.
The restaurant chain even released a (pretty silly) commercial for the STRAW. It’s narrated by someone named Jeffrey Roy, isn’t a McDonald’s executive or an engineer, but according to the subtitles, just a “Person with British Accent.”
“We soon realized, a conventional, mono-cylindrical straw would not provide the ideal flavor ratio,” Roy says in the video. (The caption translates that mumbo jumbo into “He’s just describing a regular straw.”) “Thus, a spectacularly unnecessary product was born. The Suction Tube for Reverse Axial Withdrawal. The STRAW,” he says, revealing the meaning behind the acronym. The straw is J-shaped with a hole at the base, and several holes along the short end of the J, which are supposed to help suck both flavors into the straw and then shoot them towards your happy tastebuds.
“It was a puzzling assignment but one with an ambitious goal,” Seth Newburg, principal engineer and managing partner at NK Labs, said in a statement. “From a physics perspective, it’s actually quite difficult to deliver a proportional amount of both chocolate and mint flavors with each sip. But that’s exactly what we did. It’s a marvel of fluid dynamics. Thanks Fibonacci sequence.”
Unfortunately, only 2,000 STRAWs have been created, so if you want to get your hands on one, you’ll have to act quickly. They will be available for a limited time in select participating restaurants to those who buy a Chocolate Shamrock Shake.
Agencies/Canadajournal
