Yihetang and Mixue Ice Cream & Tea Exposed Again for Using Expired Ingredients! Is Food Safety No Longer Valued in the Industry?

New-Style Tea Shops: A Lifeline for Young Consumers

When you're happy, you grab a cheese tea; when you're sad, you indulge in signature milk tea with extra toppings; when you're thirsty, you reach for a fruit tea! New-style tea shops have become the "lifeline" for today's younger generation.

The Growing Food Safety Crisis in Tea Industry

As consumer demands continue to rise, tea beverage brands are constantly expanding their stores while innovating their products. In this race to attract more consumers, food safety issues have gradually become a widespread problem in the new-style tea industry.

The recurring food safety incidents are inextricably linked to large-scale store expansion and poor brand management. The high operating costs of directly-operated brand stores create a conflict between low costs and high quality. Meanwhile, franchise stores suffer from insufficient professional management, coupled with the mixed quality of personnel across various tea beverage shops, leaving the entire new-style tea industry in an extremely unhealthy state. This situation is deeply concerning for both the industry's sustainable development and consumer health.

Recent Violations: Mixue and Yihetang Under Fire

Recently, Mixue and Yihetang—both popular among students—once again landed on Weibo's trending topics simultaneously for using expired ingredients. On July 4th, according to administrative penalty information published on the Credit China (Yueyang, Hunan) website, a Yihetang store in Hunan was fined 5,976 yuan by the Yueyang County Market Supervision Administration for using expired pudding and making and selling a total of 8 "Yibei Grass Jelly" milk teas from May 12th until the ingredients were seized.

On the same day, a Mixue store in Beijing was fined 5,000 yuan by the Fengtai District Market Supervision Administration because their opened frozen lychee juice had exceeded the store's required shelf life by 2 days. As milk tea brands once again make headlines for food safety issues, netizens seem increasingly resigned. Although regulatory authorities have imposed appropriate administrative penalties, the weak legal deterrents mean that repeat offenders show no signs of learning their lesson.

Disturbing Practices Exposed

Not long ago, Yihetang was exposed by undercover journalists for various shocking problems. Employees showed complete disregard for food safety issues, with unsanitary food handling environments and the use of expired and moldy ingredients leaving many netizens stunned.

This May, multiple Yihetang stores in Zhengzhou were found to have numerous issues: using "closed-for-the-day" ingredients the next day, relabeling expired ingredients for continued use, using moldy fruit, fishing out insects that fell into toppings and continuing to use them, discovering insects in completed drinks, unsealing them to remove the insects, and resealing for resale, employees not wearing gloves while handling fruits as required, and flies crawling around the tea dispenser outlets. Regarding these issues that could affect consumer health, employees not only showed no concern but even remarked: "As long as it doesn't kill the customers, it's fine."

Mixue stores in multiple cities have been exposed for various violations, including altering date labels on opened ingredients, using expired coffee powder, arbitrarily changing or not recording ingredient expiration tracking cards, using overnight ice cream mixtures, tea, and milk tea materials, and not cleaning fresh fruits before use. These stores have received varying degrees of penalties from local market supervision administrations.

Is this because they're cheap? Not at all. Even directly-operated brands that typically target the mid-to-high-end new-style tea market have frequently been exposed for various hygiene issues! Although their brand expansion methods differ, their approach to food safety problems is remarkably similar.

Systemic Management Issues

Every administrative penalty can be said to target only the company itself, as employees feel no sense of alarm—everything is treated with such indifference. In the restaurant market, both personnel and management require time to mature, and store managers play a particularly crucial role.

As the saying goes, "When the upper beam is not straight, the lower beam will be crooked." With the current situation of large-scale expansion across various brand stores, good store managers are hard to find, causing many stores' management to lag behind the brand's service and quality standards. Due to the lack of experienced store managers, there are significant discrepancies in daily sales forecasting and inventory planning, often resulting in the continued use of expired ingredients.

The situation with store managers is not optimistic, and the circumstances with store employees also warrant deep reflection. High staff turnover rates lead managers to place strict requirements on employees. Cases of insufficient personnel training followed by immediate deployment to work are everywhere, with problems being passed down from one generation of employees to the next, further exacerbating mistakes. Food safety awareness becomes increasingly neglected with each generation, leading to recurring problems.

Industry Challenges and Consumer Trust

As brand owners rush to expand their scale, can they consider personnel quality and food safety issues? These seemingly "minor" issues repeatedly cause consumers to lose trust—can this truly lead to healthy development? Obviously not. Making money is important, but consumer health is even more crucial.

Chinese food industry analyst Zhu Danpeng once stated: "Excessively rapid expansion brings certain risks to brand identity and food safety." As it currently stands, food safety has become the biggest problem for brand enterprises. The new-style tea beverage industry continues to develop rapidly, but how to balance space, scale, and economic benefits remains a difficult challenge for the entire industry. However, regardless of how this balance is achieved, food safety should always be the top priority.

Image Source: Internet

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