Franchises serve up foul food and flout regulations

Apparently, the staff at the McDonald’s outlet did not follow operating procedures for storing ingredients for hamburgers. According to McDonald’s handbook, lettuce, cucumber and cheese on the preparation counter can only be kept for two hours, with french fries for seven minutes and grilled and fried meat to be stored in heat insulation boxes for different durations. When the time is up, an alarm on a timekeeping system is triggered and the expired food will be thrown away.

However, investigative journalists discovered that fried chicken wings were kept in the heat insulation box for one hour and 24 minutes longer than the permitted duration. It was also found that two packets of cheese were opened and kept at the preparation counter for four hours and 20 minutes. The cheese had become dry and discoloured. The normal storage duration should be 30 minutes.

There were also problems in the handling of the taro and pineeapple pies. The pies come with wrappers and an expiry date. But it was a common practice by the staff to alter the date after it expired. Sometimes the staff would even change the wrappers of the expired pies to new ones.

A staff member said: “The standard practice is to throw (the expired food) away, but you cannot do that. None of the outlets throw them away, they open one eye and close the other. What rules? Rules are made by people!”

In one incident, when a packet of beefburger patties fell on the floor in the kitchen, a worker picked them up and put them back into the plastic bag without cleaning them.

Soon after the programme was aired, McDonald’s said in a statement that the food chain in China was taking the matter seriously. “We would like to apologise to consumers on this matter. Although the incident is an isolated case, we will not tolerate a practice that is contrary to McDonald’s operating standards. We will carry out an investigation into the outlet immediately,” said McDonald’s China.

Following the incident, the Sanlitun outlet was closed and visited by health officials from the Beijing government.

In a separate case, staff at the Carrefour store in Zhengzhou were found to have changed expiration dates of chicken products and sold regular chicken as the more expensive free-range poultry.

A journalist bought a box of chicken gizzards, marked the box and put it back in the freezer. The next day, he returned to the store and found four boxes of chicken gizzards. He discovered that the chicken gizzards in the marked box had been separated and wrapped in three other boxes. The packaging date was changed to that day. At a counter selling chicken, the journalist also found that when a staff member was replenishing stock, he took out chicken from a bag labelled as regular chicken but sold it as more expensive free-range chicken. 

“The sales of free-range chicken is better,” a worker said. “Whether it’s regular or free-range chicken, it’s for us to decide.”

Carrefour China has apologised to the public over the incident. Deputy general manager Zhang Zhen added that the workers involved had been suspended and the company would intensify training for its workers to safeguard consumers’ interest.

Zhengzhou city industry and commerce bureau deputy chief Zhao Zhongxiang said investigations revealed that the store had no inventory and supply record of free-range poultry. However, in the past two years, the store sold more than 5,000 kg of free-range chicken, making about 40,000 yuan ($6,300).

“We have confiscated the money and fined the store five times the value,” the Dahe.cn portal quoted him as saying after meeting operators from 10 supermarkets in the city recently.