The QR Code on McDonald's Drink Cups Hides a Secret No One Has Noticed

In recent years QR Codes have become increasingly popular. Besides street stores with more young people using QR Codes as a marketing tactic, traces of QR codes are gradually appearing on products around us. The reason manufacturers design these QR Codes is nothing more than to let users connect directly to the official website or join activities, saving the paper and printing costs of manuals and doing a bit for the environment.

The multinational real-estate business “McDonald’s,” which always rides the crest of the times, has unsurprisingly also adopted the new technology of QR Codes on its products.

Figure 1 below is a cola drink cup I bought at McDonald’s. A large red QR Code is printed on the side of the cup; let’s call it the Big Red Code for now.

Figure 1, a common McDonald’s drink cup.

If we scan the Big Red Code with a phone, the QR Code encoding system will guide us directly to McDonald’s official website.

However, the editor discovered that beside the Big Red Code QR Code, there is also a tiny phone icon hidden, and within the phone icon is hidden another tiny QR Code — let’s call it the Little Black Code. We usually just treat this small phone icon as an instruction for scanning with a phone.

Because this Little Black Code is extremely small, the lens of an ordinary smartphone or tablet can hardly capture a sufficiently clear encoded image.

Because its existence is so inconspicuous, I had always taken it for granted and never paid special attention to the existence of this QR Code, nor ever wondered whether some secret information was hidden inside. (Many people are probably like the editor, right?)

Figure 2, a closer look at the QR Code on the drink cup.

But in a person’s life there are always some silly things done out of boredom. One boring night I actually thought of using a DSLR camera and a macro lens to photograph the Little Black Code, then transferring it to a computer to enlarge and process the image to enhance resolution.

The result after some effort is the very large little QR Code shown in Figure 3 below.

Figure 3, the ultra-small QR Code after image enhancement.

Then scanning this enlarged Little Black Code with a phone reveals that although the tiny QR Code is small, it is fully equipped — it really does hide something inside.

Figure 4, the information scanned by the barcode scanner.

Only this time, the Little Black Code does not connect the phone to McDonald’s Taiwan official website like the Big Red Code, but instead guides directly to McDonald’s US official website.

Figure 5, the US McDonald’s main site.

From this it seems that whether for domestic US stores or overseas branches, the main materials of all McDonald’s product designs still come from the hand of the US headquarters. So this phone image that everyone originally thought was just an auxiliary instruction actually hides such an unknown secret inside.

But from this case we can also see that McDonald’s designers have indeed carefully considered even the smallest details, meaning the completion level of their product design is very high.

Friends who are interested can go to McDonald’s for dinner and order a burger (remember to upgrade the drink), and by the way test whether your phone’s close-up capability (also called macro photography) can capture this tiny QR Code. Perhaps your phone’s hardware specs are better than mine (gazing into the distance).

Uh, this article is not a sponsored post.