Alas, gone are the glory days of forcing your local McDonald’s to pile 30 cheese slices on a two-foot-tall Big Mac: The chain has summarily ended Create Your Taste, the custom-burger program it once described as “a big deal.” Customers had almost three dozen ingredients at their disposal — a variety of buns, caramelized onions, chili-lime tortilla strips, guacamole, etc. — that could be used to create a $10 fast-food hamburger surprisingly quickly. Orders were placed at nifty high-tech computer kiosks whose $125,000 price tags almost caused angry franchisees to revolt.
Once customer reviews came in, it was clear people didn’t hate the fancier burgers, but the consensus was that they verged on a ripoff and, for fast food, took a near-eternity to cook. Business Insider noticed that in the past month the Create Your Taste option had started to vanish from menus; McCorporate confirmed to the site that the platform was indeed over.
In its place, McDonald’s says it’s now testing something called Signature Crafted Recipes, which is seemingly a watered-down version of TasteCrafted, itself a lite version of Create Your Taste that McDonald’s rushed into tests last year when Create Your Taste began hitting hurdles. As the chain’s next “customizable burger platform,” Signature Crafted Recipes appears to primarily achieve two things: (1) have far fewer options for customization (either beef or chicken with four topping “bundles” — maple bacon Dijon, deluxe, Buffalo bacon, and pico guacamole), and (2) find another use for those big, incredibly expensive kiosks franchisees went through the hassle of installing.
