It’s Saint Patrick’s Day, and everyone is Irish. In honor of the holiday, McDonald’s unleashed its annual green mint concoction as it does around every St. Paddy’s Day–the Shamrock Shake.
There are a couple of new twists with this year’s batch of Shamrock Shake. First,
McDonald’s unveiled the Shamrock variant: the Chocolate Shamrock Shake. It’s a frothy, viscous brew with notes of chocolate and minty shamrocki-ness; evoking a tongue-coating thin mint cookie-in-a-blender taste experience.Also, McDonald’s introduced its new high-tech straw. No, you can’t connect it to Wi-Fi. And no, it doesn’t have any cool LED lights, nor does it integrate with Alexa (yet).
The tricked-out straw was designed by a team of aerospace and robotic engineers. And here’s the science to the straw, as per McDonald’s press release:
“The Chocolate Shamrock Shake, one of four new seasonal McCafé beverages, has dual layers of delicious chocolate shake below Shamrock Shake. The new recipe presented McDonald’s a unique challenge to reinvent the shake experience. To deliver the ideal flavor ratio of 50% chocolate and 50% mint in each sip, versus enjoying each flavor separately with a traditional straw, McDonald’s turned to highly-qualified engineering firms. JACE and NK Labs created the probably-more-revolutionary-than-actually-needed Suction Tube for Reverse Axial Withdrawal (the STRAW). The STRAW’s j-shape provides optimal flavor flow dynamics.”
“It was a puzzling assignment, but one with an ambitious
goal,” said Seth Newburg, the principal engineer and managing partner at NK Labs. “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.”So, does the straw live up to the hype? Here is an honest assessment from Black Enterprise’s copy editor Jordan Willard, as shot by videographer Elisha Holmes:
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