Very recently, there were several reports of how BBC investigators from Watchdog, found contaminated ice in fast food giants like KFC and McDonald’s questioning the hygiene of their ice machines. Going one step further in proving how such large fast food chains don’t really abide by the rules of hygiene, a McDonald’s employee tweeted a photograph of an ice cream machine’s drip tray which was coated in grime, looked extremely dirty and sticky. The employee was actually fired!
The photo of McDonalds dirty ice tray taken at their Louisiana location has gone viral and invited a huge backlash for the company.
According to the employee named only “Nick”, ice machines are supposed to be cleaned regularly by store managers but he never saw them once do it. Nick worked in McDonald’s from March till this month.
His tweet was captioned “This came out of McDonald’s ice cream machine in case y’all were wondering…”
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The image of McDonald’s dirty ice tray has been carried by large magazines like Teen Vogue and Cosmopolitan and has also been retweeted 13,000 times. It has received 15,000 likes. Foodbeast remarked that the filthy slime doesn’t get into the ice cream and nobody would have liked seeing such photos coming out of a restaurant like McDonalds. Following close on the heels of Nick’s incident, two more employees of McDonald’s tweeted images taken in the fast food chain that could be termed disgusting.
In an interview to Huffpo Nick said that there were several other sanitary issues at McDonald are where he worked.
“Sometimes my coworkers would drop the food and put it back on the bun. I’ve seen it happen several times.” He also went as far as to share more images of McDonald’s frozen food pre cooking. “Since I’m exposing McDonald’s I might as well show y’all what y’all really eating… fresh out the freezer.”
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In Laplace, there are two McDonald’s joints but Nick refused to mention which one he worked in. According to the most recent health inspections held by Louisiana Department of Health Records, it showed that one of these locations in Laplace had three critical corrected infractions, cross contamination of ready to eat and raw food, improper means of storing toxic chemicals and dirty utensils and workstation surfaces.
McDonalds has not yet responded to HuffPo’s request for a comment on the image that has gone viral. In all fairness, it needs to be noted that the company is a multinational one with franchises across the country and is not in charge of the operations of each and every restaurant.
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A dateline investigation of ten of the top fast food chains in the country which took one and a half year to complete included 100 restaurants from each chain across 38 states. It revealed McDonald’s with 136 critical violations across all of the 100 chosen locations. Some of them did not even possess a trained and certified food handler as required by law. However, McDonald’s still had fewer violations as compared to Subway, Burger King and KFC. All ten chains displayed unhygienic and questionable practices.
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McDonald’s is used to food criticism and questions on its food handling and ingredients procedures. McDonald’s dirty ice tray seems small in comparison to the BBC investigation last week which revealed fecal matter in the ice cubes served in drinks to customers. Moreover, the chain has also been questioned about its low-quality unhealthy ingredients used such as beef injected with antibiotics to the so called healthy Kale salad launched last year which contained even more calories than a Big Mac.
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