The little red-haired girl is taking a swing at the big dog

Fast-food chain Wendy’s makes a fraction of what McDonald’s rakes in every year, but that hasn’t stopped it from spotting a weak point in Ronald’s clown armor and going on the attack.

Wendy’s confidence as the aggressor centers on its most reliable menu item: the humble Frosty. 

A cross between a milkshake and a regular scoop of ice cream, the Frosty has been on the Wendy’s menu since founder Dave Thomas opened his first location in 1969.

• The classic flavor is a cross between chocolate and vanilla.
• Other options, like pumpkin spice and an upcoming SpongeBob SquarePants crossover, have popped up.
• Some die-hard Frostyheads resent the fad flavors for displacing vanilla (which is a bit like hating the stars for replacing the clouds). 

Meanwhile…

… McDonald’s has its McFlurry, a dairy innovation that answers the question: “What if ice cream had stuff in it?” Unfortunately, the McFlurry machine is infamously unreliable.

• McBroken, a web app by software developer Rashiq Zahid, tracks which locations aren’t serving ice cream.
• Taylor Co. manufactures ice-cream machines for loads of chains, including both Wendy’s and McDonald’s, but McDonald’s insists on using a unique model.
• It’s not that the Taylor machines constantly break, per Allrecipes, but that they have a time-intensive self-cleaning process that seems to… break easily.
• BTW, while we’re talking about the McFlurry: In 2006, McDonald’s was forced to redesign its widemouthed McFlurry lids in England after hedgehog conservationists noticed the favorite little prickly guys could easily get trapped in them.

Taking the fight straight to Grimace’s doormat…

… Wendy’s has allied itself with McBroken to promote a $1 Frosty deal with an ad on the website and new icons on the map to show if you’re closer to a Wendy’s than you are to a functioning McFlurry machine.

Last quarter, McDonald’s posted $6.49B in revenue while Wendy’s hit $570m, so this may not immediately put Wendy’s on top, but it does invite the question: Will round hamburgers soon be a thing of the past?