It’s a hot summer day, you’re dehydrated and desperately craving a cold beverage. What do you do? Maybe you go to Starbucks and buy a refreshing caramel frappucino. Or perhaps you go to McDonald’s and get yourself an ice-cold Diet Coke. Absolutely harmless, right? Wrong. I’d put that drink down, because it turns out there might actually be human poo in your drink… Delightful.
After discovering last month that there were traces of faecal bacteria in the ice served at Starbucks, Costa and Café Nero, a new investigation commissioned by the BBC Watchdog programme has found similar results in the ice used at the UK’s biggest fast food chains -McDonald’s, KFC and Burger King. Ice used in soft drinks was sampled at 10 randomly selected branches of the three chains, testing 30 fast-food restaurants in total. They found that KFC was the worst offender, with seven out of the 10 samples being contaminated with coliforms – these are bacterial indicators of faeces. It’s definitely nothing to brag about, but the runner up was Burger King with six contaminated samples. McDonald’s was guilty of having three.
DEFRA, the government department that oversees the standards of drinking water say that there shouldn’t be any trace whatsoever of faecal contamination in water used for human consumption as the coliforms can carry a number of diseases. So, it’s pretty gross stuff, and pretty dangerous too.
KFC claims that they have shut down the ice machines used in the investigation to fully clean and inspect them – but what about the rest of their ice machines across the country?
McDonald’s said: ‘As the investigation highlights, there are no specific ice production standards in place, only those relating to unfrozen drinking water. We would therefore welcome the introduction of an agreed standard and would be happy to work with relevant industry bodies.’
To be fair though McDonald’s, do you really need ice production standards in place to keep your customers from literally drinking human poo?
Each of the chains have responded by saying that they plan to up their game when it comes to their ice production standards – and hopefully they follow through (that was a hideous pun, apologies).
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.