Thursday, December 11, 2008

Starbucks is in the news again, this time for something worse than the water tap incident.

Apparently, a customer visited a Starbucks outlet in Taiwan and ordered brewed coffee and requested to put the beverage in a paper cup. Well, soon after, he discovered something wrong with his coffee and the story in short is that his coffee contained cleaning solution and the paper cup was corroded.

Well, i can tell you honestly it is simply an oversight of the closing partners. You see, the brewer is cleaned every night after closing. Our brewer consists of two parts, the funnel section and the container section. Coffee grinds is put inside the funnel section and hot water is passed through it, dripping into the container section. That is how we brew coffee. When we clean, we empty a pack of KAY-5 sanitizer powder into the container section and as usual, let hot water drip through the now empty funnel section into the container section, dissolving the sanitizer powder and cleaning the container section at the same time.

My guess is, the closing partners forgot to let hot water enter the container section to clean the container. So the powder is left in the container overnight and when the opening partners brew a new batch of coffee, the coffee is of course mixed with the sanitizer powder and hence this is why there is cleaning solution in that particular customer's coffee. I dare assure you this is a stand alone incident and definitely an oversight on our part, definitely not part of our SOP. I mean, anyone in the right frame of mind don't brew sanitizer powder and coffee together right?

So, any more questions?