In the McDonald's case, though, it wasn't a "hack". It was simply reporting the error properly. Apparently one of the biggest failure modes is "overfull suppl

In the McDonald's case, though, it wasn't a "hack". It was simply reporting the error properly. Apparently one of the biggest failure modes is "overfull supply hopper doesn't heat fast enough". Just reporting that tells you what you need to do to fix the problem. Dump a couple cups out and rerun the cycle. Or "feed too viscous"--dump the entire thing and run water on a cycle. Then reload with a fresh batch. This seems to be emblematic of that machine. And, the problem isn't that these machines don't have good error reporting. The problem is the fact that these machines are terribly unreliable. A 15% failure rate is bad. However, there is no money to be gained from fixing the issues. So, neither Taylor nor McDonalds's will spend any money to fix it. It's also emblematic that, given the health sensitive nature of the machines, no other company attempts to do heating in place. I presume that somebody in those franchises looked at the reliability numbers and laughed Taylor out of the room.