A restaurant can own an oven without necessarily owning everything it needs to fix that oven. That distinction would have sounded strange when commercial kitchen equipment was largely mechanical. A technician diagnosing a failed fryer, refrigerator or mixer needed knowledge, a wiring diagram, a meter and access to replacement parts. Today’s commercial equipment can include electronic control boards, touchscreens, sensors, proprietary software, digital fault codes and components that communicate with one another. In some cases, diagnosing the problem requires access to information or software controlled by the manufacturer.
That has pulled restaurants and commercial appliance technicians into a national debate that began with smartphones and laptops but now extends to tractors, automobiles, medical equipment and even soft-serve machines. It is called the right to repair, and in 2026 it is having a particularly big year. More than 50 right-to-repair bills have been introduced around the United States this year, according to recent reporting on the movement, and federal lawmakers introduced the Fair Repair Act in February. The proposed legislation would require manufacturers of covered digital electronic equipment to provide owners and independent repair companies with documentation, parts and tools needed for diagnosis, maintenance and repair on fair and reasonable terms.
The debate raises a question that is becoming increasingly relevant to any business dependent on expensive equipment: When you buy a machine, how much control should the manufacturer retain over your ability to keep it running?
Right to Repair Is Not Really About Doing It Yourself
The name can be misleading. Right-to-repair advocates are not necessarily arguing that the owner of a restaurant should open a malfunctioning combi oven and start rewiring it between the lunch and dinner shifts. The larger argument is about choice and access. A 2021 Wirecutter explanation of the movement described four major goals pushed by repair advocates: access to manuals and software information, access to parts and diagnostic tools, the ability to unlock or modify devices, and product designs that make repair possible. Gay Gordon-Byrne, executive director of The Repair Association, summarized the design issue more simply: “We stop making things that can’t be fixed.”
That principle becomes more complicated when software is part of the machine. The Federal Trade Commission has documented repair restrictions that include proprietary diagnostic programs, limited parts availability, specialized tools, software locks and designs that make equipment difficult to service outside a manufacturer’s authorized network. For a consumer whose laptop is broken, those restrictions can be frustrating. For a restaurant whose primary oven, dishwasher or refrigeration equipment is down, the consequences can accumulate by the hour.
Then There Was the McDonald’s Ice Cream Machine
No commercial appliance has become a better symbol of this problem than the McDonald’s soft-serve machine. For years, McDonald’s famously temperamental ice cream equipment was mostly an internet joke. It eventually became something far more unusual: an exhibit in the national right-to-repair debate.
At a 2023 congressional hearing on right to repair, Representative Russell Fry of South Carolina raised the McDonald’s problem directly. Kyle Wiens, CEO of repair company iFixit, explained that the Taylor machines used by McDonald’s relied on complicated touchscreen controls and a service password that limited access to settings needed for diagnosis and repair. Wiens told Congress, “It is not the poor McDonald’s employees’ fault. It is the machine’s fault.”
The mechanics of the machine were only part of the issue. Because software inside the equipment was protected under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, bypassing certain digital restrictions in order to diagnose the machine could itself create a legal problem. That meant a copyright law written in 1998 to prevent unauthorized access to copyrighted material could affect who was able to diagnose a commercial ice cream machine decades later.
A Small Device Challenged the System
The dispute became more complicated with the arrival of Kytch, a startup that developed a device capable of connecting to Taylor soft-serve machines and providing restaurant operators with much more useful information about what the machine was doing and why it had stopped working. That information mattered because a machine displaying a fault was not necessarily mechanically destroyed. Sometimes the larger obstacle was determining what the equipment was trying to communicate.
Kytch and McDonald’s eventually became involved in litigation after McDonald’s warned franchisees against using the device, citing safety concerns. Meanwhile, the controversy attracted the attention of repair advocates, lawmakers and federal agencies. In 2023, iFixit dismantled a Taylor machine itself and concluded that the machine was not inherently impossible to repair. Access to diagnosis was a significant part of the problem. The humble McFlurry machine had become a case study in what happens when mechanical ownership and digital access are no longer the same thing.
In 2024, the Government Changed the Rules
The Federal Trade Commission and Justice Department entered the debate in March 2024. In comments submitted to the U.S. Copyright Office, the agencies argued that expanding repair exemptions could increase competition among repair companies, lower costs and reduce delays by preventing software protections from unnecessarily blocking legitimate repair.
The Copyright Office ultimately stopped short of granting the broad exemption for commercial and industrial machinery that advocates requested. It did, however, single out one category: commercial food equipment. In October 2024, the Register of Copyrights recommended an exemption covering computer programs controlling equipment “primarily designed for use in retail-level commercial food preparation” when bypassing the software protection is necessary for diagnosis, maintenance or repair. That recommendation became part of the federal exemption now found in 37 C.F.R. § 201.40.
It was a remarkably specific legal victory. Federal copyright rules now explicitly recognize the repair of commercial food-preparation equipment.
What Changed, and What Didn’t
The ruling did not suddenly make every restaurant appliance completely open for repair. It addressed one particular obstacle: copyright law could no longer automatically prevent an owner or technician from circumventing a digital protection when doing so was necessary to diagnose, maintain or repair qualifying commercial food-preparation equipment.
That is different from requiring every manufacturer to hand every independent technician its proprietary software, stock every old component forever or release its trade secrets. Repair advocates have pointed out that federal copyright rules restricting the distribution of circumvention tools can still make it difficult to turn the legal right to access equipment into practical repair tools that technicians can easily obtain. The Copyright Office also declined to extend the 2024 exemption to the much broader universe of commercial and industrial equipment because it found the record insufficient to justify such a sweeping change. The McDonald’s decision was therefore an important step, but hardly the end of the argument.
2026 Has Pushed Right to Repair Back Into the Spotlight
Two years later, repair remains an active federal and state policy issue. The Fair Repair Act introduced in Congress in February 2026 would require manufacturers of covered digital electronic equipment to make parts, documentation and tools available to owners and independent repair providers. It also addresses “parts pairing,” a technique in which software controls whether a replacement component will function properly after installation. As of August 2026, the bills remain introduced legislation rather than federal law.
An even more significant development came in July, when the FTC and five states reached a settlement with Deere & Company over repair access for farm equipment. Under the agreement, Deere must provide farmers and independent repair providers with repair resources comparable to those available to its authorized dealers, including the ability to read and reset electronic fault codes, reprogram components and use technical troubleshooting information.
The case is about tractors, not commercial ovens, but the technological issue should sound familiar to anyone who works around modern equipment. A machine has a problem. The owner has hired someone capable of repairing it. Yet completing the repair can depend on access to software, codes, documentation or electronic functions controlled by the manufacturer. That is exactly why a fight that started around smartphones has steadily expanded into machinery.
The Manufacturers Have an Argument Too
There is another side to this debate, particularly when commercial appliances are involved. Foodservice equipment can involve high-voltage electricity, natural gas, pressurized steam, refrigerants, high temperatures, water and moving components. A bad repair can damage more than the machine. Industry groups opposing broad right-to-repair mandates have therefore cited safety, cybersecurity, intellectual property and equipment reliability among their concerns. The Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers, for example, has argued that unrestricted diagnostic access can introduce safety risks when sophisticated equipment is serviced by people without appropriate training.
Those concerns become especially relevant in a commercial kitchen, but allowing independent repair does not require pretending every person with a screwdriver is qualified to perform it. There is already an established professional service industry built around specialized training. The Commercial Food Equipment Service Association tests technicians in four core disciplines: electricity, gas, steam and refrigeration. Its Master Technician designation requires passing three of those four technical exams.
That suggests a more useful way to frame the right-to-repair question. The choice does not have to be between manufacturer control and unsafe do-it-yourself repair. It can be between a closed service system and a competitive market of qualified technicians who have access to the information and tools required to work on increasingly sophisticated machines.
Downtime Changes the Economics
Commercial equipment also makes the economics of repair different from the consumer examples that originally drove much of the movement. A homeowner can sometimes live without a dishwasher for several days. A restaurant may not have that luxury. A failed walk-in cooler puts inventory at risk. A malfunctioning dish machine can affect the ability to serve customers safely. Losing a primary oven can force a restaurant to remove menu items or reduce production. The real cost of a broken appliance can therefore be considerably larger than the repair bill itself.
Manufacturers themselves recognize how important downtime is. Hobart, one of the largest commercial food-equipment manufacturers and service providers, promotes a nationwide network of 125 service locations, approximately 1,500 technicians and more than 40,000 parts SKUs around the need to get commercial kitchens operational quickly. Parts availability, diagnostic access and technician availability are not minor conveniences in that environment. They are part of operating infrastructure.
When a qualified commercial appliance repair company can diagnose equipment sooner, source the proper component and return a machine to service without unnecessary delays, the value extends well beyond the invoice for the repair. The restaurant gets its productive asset back, avoids unnecessary replacement and retains more control over equipment it may have spent tens of thousands of dollars to purchase.
Who Really Owns the Machine?
That brings the right-to-repair debate back to its simplest question: what does ownership mean when the equipment you purchased depends on software you cannot access, fault codes you cannot interpret or tools you cannot obtain?
Wirecutter raised essentially the same issue five years ago as electronics became increasingly difficult to service, noting that even appliances, historically among the more repairable products people owned, were incorporating computer chips and becoming more complicated to fix. The commercial kitchen is now living through the same transition, only with much higher stakes when a critical machine stops operating.
There will always be repairs that require factory training. There will be proprietary technologies manufacturers have a legitimate interest in protecting. There will also be gas, electrical and refrigeration work that should never be attempted without appropriate qualifications. None of that necessarily answers the larger question. If an independent professional has the knowledge to perform the repair safely, should a digital lock, unavailable diagnostic program or inaccessible service document be the thing that prevents it?
The federal government has already answered that question, at least partially, for commercial food-preparation equipment. Congress, state legislatures, manufacturers, equipment owners and repair professionals are still debating how much further that answer should go. As commercial kitchens become increasingly digital, the question is likely to become harder to ignore.