Review: McDonald's - "Korean Iced Coffee Hack"

McDonald's "Korean Iced Coffee Hack" was popularized on social media and basically consists of buying an iced black coffee and soft serve cone and mixing the soft serve from the cone into the coffee.

From what I gather, the name comes from the practice of combining a soft-serve cone, a sealed cup of ice, and a pouch of coffee (or coffee concentrate) from the freezer at convenience stores in South Korea. Here in the US, packaged soft-serve cones aren't easy to come by but McDonald's conveniently offers both soft-serve cones and coffee.

I bought a medium iced coffee with light ice, no cream, and no sugar for $2.59 and got a Vanilla Cone (normally $2.19) for free because I had enough points in the McDonald's App.

I drank some of the iced coffee by itself to make room in the cup to add the vanilla soft serve. The coffee by itself was actually pretty good. It was robust and smooth with a roasty but not charred finish.

Mixing in the vanilla soft serve added some icy thickness as well as a sweet and creamy note tinged with vanilla. It's tasty but besides the extra texture, it's not much different from adding cream and sugar to your coffee.

While the McDonald's "Korean Iced Coffee Hack" results in a lightly sweet, creamy coffee with a bit of vanilla ice cream flavor, I would rather just get an iced coffee with creamy, sugar, and a pump of the chain's French Vanilla syrup and save myself the extra cost of the Vanilla Cone (which is mostly milk, cream, and sugar anyway). The extra texture isn't worth the extra price.