The humble drinking straw is pretty straightforward in terms of its design and functionality. It’s a hollowed out tube that lets people suck liquid through it. Sure, there are a variety of designs like straws that can bend, “crazy” straws, straws with a tiny scoop at the end, but at the end of the day, they’re pretty much the same thing.
However it seems that as part of a marketing campaign, McDonald’s decided that the straw should be re-engineered which is why they got a team of robotic and aerospace engineers to reinvent the straw that you see in the photo above. Like we said this is part of a marketing move for McDonald’s new Chocolate Shamrock Shake, where the straw has been redesigned as a means to solve a “problem”.
What problem is this? Basically the Chocolate Shamrock Shake is a chocolate milkshake with minty seasonings. Instead of waiting for the drink to melt so that you can mix the flavors, the straw actually comes with two holes, meaning that you get to suck up the minty seasonings and chocolate shake at the same time.
According to McDonald’s, this isn’t as simple as cutting an extra hole as apparently fairly complex computational fluid dynamics simulations was needed to get the flow right. Unfortunately the straw will be limited in quantity so McDonald’s has told those who are interested to check its website in the coming weeks if they’d like to find out where to get them.
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