A Canadian mother is sounding the alarm after she was served cleaning fluid instead of a latte at McDonald’s.
Sarah Douglas is from the town of Lethbridge, about 130 miles south of Calgary, in Alberta, Canada. She was taking her son to a baseball tournament when she went through a McDonald’s drive-thru to get coffee.
It turned out, the milk in her latte wasn’t milk at all, but cleaning fluid.
According to Dan Brown, the franchisee at that location, the milk supply line for the coffee machine was still connected to the cleaning solution. So, while most of us would probably have just spit out the coffee and gone back to get a new one, Sarah Douglas is eight months pregnant, so she wasn’t going to be as chill about the whole thing.
She went through the ingredients of the cleaner she’d ingested, and it contains things like fatty alcohol polyglycol aether and potassium metasilicate that you really shouldn’t be ingesting.
Of course, since she spit out the drink right away, she got a clean bill of health from her doctor, who said she, and her baby, are fine. However she wants McDonalds, and all restaurants, to focus on proper training and health considerations, so this kind of thing doesn’t happen.
But look, there are over 15,000 McDonald’s locations in North America.
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Everyone’s trained on how to change the tubes from the cleaner to the milk. But, just statistically, once in awhile, someone’s gonna forget to switch the lines.
It’s never going to be 100% reliability – mistakes happen. That said, McDonald’s has plenty of money to pay off someone once in awhile who accidentally drinks cleaning fluid. Case in point: Indianapolis police officer Paul Watkins, who got cleaning solution in his tea in 2015, and in 2013, another family filed a lawsuit after a teenage boy vomited from ingesting McDonalds ice tea with cleaning fluid.
It’s not just McDonald’s either.
In 2014, a woman named Jan Harding spent several days in the hospital after drinking ice tea that had been mistakenly “sweetened” with lye at Dickie’s BBQ Pit in Utah. That last case was settled out of court and we have a sneaking suspicion the McDonald’s incidents were as well.
Now, I know what you’re thinking. But here’s a What’s Trending disclaimer: do not try to defraud McDonald’s by pouring your own cleaning fluid into coffee or ice tea and drinking it to intentionally get sick so that you can get a cash settlement from the company that doesn’t want negative press.
It might sound like a good idea right now, but we really really don’t want to be reporting on the McDonald’s Cleaning Fluid Challenge this summer. Seriously.
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As far as that McDonald’s in Canada goes, inspectors from Alberta Health checked out the location, determined it was a one-time mistake, and said there isn’t an ongoing investigation.
What do you guys think? Is there any way to 100% prevent mistakes like these at restaurants? Let us know in the comments or on Twitter at @WhatsTrending.
