Open Faced, Open Minded: My 'Create Your Taste' McDonald's Experience

By Morgan Searles (Patch Staff)

Full disclosure, until yesterday, I hadn’t eaten a McDonald’s hamburger since my Happy Meal days, when I was full of childhood desperation to get the coveted pink flamingo Beanie Baby.

But this time, my meal wasn’t motivated by the promise of a plastic bean-filled toy. I wanted to try the Create Your Taste menu.

• What is Create Your Taste? It’s an experimental ordering system at McDonald’s where customers can choose toppings using a kiosk. A quarter-pound beef patty is grilled, topped with ingredients and served open faced.

I imagined being able to specify the number of sesame seeds on my bun or submitting an order for nothing but 13 warm sliced pickles.

When I approached the large vertical touch screen menu and was welcomed by a kiosk attendant — a hamburger spirit guide, if you will — I quickly learned the McDonald’s meals of my weirdest dreams aren’t possible here.

But you can still make some monstrous and structurally unsound hamburgers with this thing.

Do you want six slices of cheese? Jalapenos x7 and grilled onions x3? You can add up to 10 toppings on your burger without paying extra. It’s a wild idea.

Obviously, the point of Create Your Taste isn’t to make a ridiculous hamburger, and for the sake of the assembly team, I’d hope no one would try. But who doesn’t get a little thrill just knowing it’s possible to request eight times the normal amount of garlic sauce?

After I customized my quarter-pound burger with pretty standard dressings, I stood a little lost and nearly alone at the pickup counter for a few minutes. I turned back to the kiosk attendant/spirit guide and asked, “Am I supposed to wait here?”

I wasn’t. That’s how unprepared I was for the table service feature.

I bashfully took my numbered receipt and a table tracker, which looks much like any restaurant buzzer you get while waiting to be seated, and I joined my lunchmates, who were sharp enough to know right away to sit down to wait.

I was surprised to learn the table tracker wasn’t made for buzzing, but for, well, table tracking. My order was assigned to my tracker, which relayed my table location to the staff so they could find me to deliver my food.

However, the trackers don’t specify where at the table each person sits, and there was some confusion when the waiter brought burgers to our table of three. She used order numbers that corresponded to numbers printed on our receipts, but there were similar numbers also assigned to each of our table trackers.

Maybe this wouldn’t ordinarily be an issue at a table service restaurant, but after spending a good bit of time poking around the menu to customize our orders, we couldn’t remember exactly what we’d chosen. It took a minute to sort out.

I was also surprised when one hamburger, ordered with pickles, arrived at our table pickle-less. Like any other restaurant operation, the kiosk system isn’t perfect.

The burgers are served open faced, with warm ingredients on the bottom bun and toppings like lettuce and tomato resting on the top. This presentation is certainly a better look than the usual paper-wrapped cheeseburgers and boxed Big Macs.

And it tastes good. I’ve turned my nose up at McDonald’s hamburgers for years, but in a grand ranking of fast food hamburgers, this one could be sandwiched between Five Guys and Whataburger.

Am I surprised? Well, yeah. In a 2014 Consumer Reports survey, customers ranked McDonald’s hamburgers below 20 similar competitor products. I guess it makes sense that the powerful and iconic burger joint would kickstart an initiative to turn that public image around. That’s what Create Your Taste is, and maybe it could work.

With that in mind, I feel compelled to weigh the honesty of this program. Is McDonald’s really offering me an upgraded service and a better burger? Or have I been lured by a novelty experience that panders to my millennial sensibilities and my affinity for big, shiny touch screens?

Is this technology good for local economies, or will human employees go the way of the Playplace?

Will I ever be able to order 13 sliced pickles via a McDonald’s kiosk?