Every year around St. Patrick’s Day, McDonald’s releases its distinctive green Shamrock Shake. But this year, there’s some controversy over the McDonald’s Shamrock Shake and its straw.
What’s the big deal about this controversy? Should you avoid the Shamrock Shake? Find out everything you need to know about this controversy today.
What is the Shamrock Shake?
The McDonald’s Shamrock Shake, as you probably already know, is an Ireland-themed milkshake created by the popular US-based fast food chain every year around St. Patrick’s Day.
The milkshake features a distinctive green coloring along with a whipped cream top. Some call the Shamrock Shake the harbinger of spring, while others wait months for the release of the Shamrock Shake every year.
The Shamrock Shake doesn’t just look green. It also tastes green. The shake has a famous mint chocolatey flavor that has little to do with Ireland, but everything to do with the color green.
Why are people suddenly talking about the McDonald’s Shamrock Shake this year? It’s because a San Francisco design studio engineered a special straw to maximize your Shamrock Shake drinking experience.
What’s the Big Deal About the Shamrock Shake Straw?
You’ve probably drank from hundreds of straws in your life. But have you ever stopped to consider how those straws work – or the engineering that goes into those straws? Probably not.
But one group of San Francisco engineers certainly thought about it, and they created the straw for the new McDonald’s Shamrock Shake.
That straw was created as a collaborative project between aerospace engineers and product designers. Those people also include the brains behind Google’s Project Ara and DARPA System F6.
You never knew a straw could be so advanced.
The straw is specially designed to mix the flavors of the Shamrock Shake in your mouth at the same time. The Shamrock Shake, of course, features mint and chocolate flavors. The longstanding problem with the shake is that these flavors didn’t uniformly mix in your mouth.
As McDonald’s explained in a recent press release, “The ideal flavor ratio of 50% chocolate and 50% mint in each sip” is hard to achieve with an ordinary straw.
In any case, McDonald’s hired a San Francisco design studio named JACE along with Massachusetts-based NK Labs to build something special.
The end result of all that hard work is something called the STRAW.
What is the STRAW?
The STRAW is the new way to drink the McDonald’s Shamrock Shake. The acronym is short for Suction Tube for Reverse Axial Withdrawal.
The straw, according to the leading engineers who developed the solution, provides “Optimal Flavor Dynamics”, which means it delivers the perfect dose of chocolate and mind flavors with each sip.
The principal engineer of the design company, Seth Newburg, described it as “a puzzling assignment” that eventually led to the creation of “a marvel of fluid dynamics”.
How Does the STRAW Work?
The STRAW looks like a long J. It has three holes along the J – not like the usual straw, which just has one hole. The entire straw is made from a substance that’s thicker than the usual plastic.
The holes are specially arranged so that you get a more even mix of flavors – even when the flavors come from different sections of the shake.
For example, if there’s whipped cream on one layer of the shake and chocolate sauce on the other, then the straw is specially designed to accommodate that problem.
How to Get the STRAW
Don’t expect to get the STRAW with every $4 Shamrock Shake you order. Instead, the STRAW is presented “like a piece of artwork” according to a report by Forbes. The STRAW arrives in a sleek black box with green trim.
Thinking of getting your hands on a STRAW? Good luck. The STRAW has only been distributed to 80 locations across the United States – and only 2,000 STRAWs have been produced so far.
Fortunately, McDonald’s has published a list of participating restaurants here. You can find your closest McDonald’s restaurant with the STRAW from that page.
Shamrock Shake Nutritional Information
The Shamrock Shake is one of the unhealthiest fast food options you could ever put in your mouth. It’s infamously bad for you. Here are some of the key stats about the Shamrock Shake and its nutritional guidelines:
- Calories: 820
- Calories from Fat: 200
- Grams of Fat: 22g (34% of the recommended daily value)
- Saturated fat: 14g (72% DV)
- Trans Fat: 1g
- Total Carbs: 103g (34% DV)
- Cholesterol: 90mg (30% DV)
- Sugar: 115g (the typical recommended amount of sugar is 25 to 36g total per day)
- Sodium: 280mg of sodium
That’s a ridiculous nutritional balance that makes the Shamrock Shake absolutely horrible for your health. It’s even unhealthy compared to other options on the McDonald’s menu. You could eat three Egg McMuffins to consume the same number of calories in one Shamrock Shake, for example, or 4.5 Krispy Kreme donuts. Why does a milkshake have such a high sodium dose? I don’t know – and I’m not sure I want to know.
Fortunately, there’s a smaller size of the Shamrock Shake that lowers the caloric total to 580 calories. Still, you should probably think twice before you take down a McDonald’s Shamrock Shake – even if it comes with a fancy “STRAW”.
