Toilet Water Latte?

When you are multi-billion dollar franchise like Starbucks, you are bound to come across the occasional bout of bad publicity.

The report in May 2013 that they were serving their drinks with toilet water was a particularly ‘potent’ one.

In the popular Bank Of China Tower store, it was alleged that the staff were using toilet water to brew their coffee, which is not only truly disgusting it is also illegal.

It is also wrong.

They were using a tap next to the toilet, so that’s ok then?

It had been confirmed that the water used in this store is in fact, certified safe drinking water.

The confusion arose due to the fact there is no direct water supply to the store itself, so the staff regularly fill up containers from the nearest available source- the taps in the toilet, not the toilet itself.

Since this revelation Starbucks has confirmed that it has switched to using distilled water for their coffees as it explores alternative water source supplies.

The toilet water scandal erupted when pictures of staff were exposed filling containers on a cart from a tap a few feet away from a urinal and pushing it back into the coffee shop, the images went viral, of course. Allegations were quickly made that Starbucks was serving customers in China toilet water itself, even though this was in fact a false accusation, the scenario was enough to cause outrage. There are many concerns regarding health and safety and cross contamination of bacteria around this method, even if the water itself is drinking water.

For a country that is one of the leaders in engineering and technology it is mind boggling for a beverage franchise in the country’s capital city to have no access to clean water in its store.

Thankfully the media frenzy that has ensued has forced the building and Starbucks to rethink their water supply

We are sure that the staff are also grateful to not be making hourly treks to the toilet to fill up buckets.

The question is, how long did this go on for until it was revealed and why didn’t Starbucks make these necessary alterations and provisions before it started trading?