- “Our internal investigations have confirmed that the partners (employees) of the two Wuxi stores reported by the media on December 13 violated our operational procedures. Safeguarding food safety is our foremost responsibility,” the company’s China division wrote in a statement, South China Morning Post reported.
- “This incident has revealed the need to strengthen daily implementation of our food-safety standards. For this, we sincerely apologize to all Starbucks customers. [We will] invest in enhancing technologies to mitigate risks of human errors or intervention, addressing the root cause of such incidents.”
- In response to the controversy, Starbucks will reportedly conduct inspections across all of its 5,400 stores in China and retrain its staff to “strictly implement Starbucks food-safety system.” It also pledged to work with officials in addressing the scandal.
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- In addition to its report, The Beijing News also published videos that the undercover journalists took. In one video, Starbucks staffers can be seen selling unsealed bread that should have already been tossed out.
- Employees from the two branches were also found replacing a chocolate sauce bottle’s expiration label and allegedly selling expired pastries and cacao nibs, WION reported.
- After investigating 82 out of the 87 Starbucks branches in Wuxi, the Wuxi Market Supervision Administration released a report stating that 15 of the branches did not comply with food safety standards.
- Some of the concerns raised in the report include “employees not wearing hats, disorderly placement of items in processing areas and incomplete disinfection records.”
- On Tuesday, health authorities in Suzhou found that 18 out of the 226 Starbucks branches in the city also had issues and food safety hazards, including “uncovered garbage cans in the processing area, employees not wearing masks [and] mixed storage of food and non-food in the warehouse.”
- That same day, the Supreme People’s Procuratorate published an op-ed criticizing the chain. It referred to one of The Beijing News videos which shows a Starbucks employees in Wuxi arguing that their branch would have to pay for the expired items that are discarded.