What Does Coffee Powder Shelf Life Teach About Expired Ingredients?

Mixue Ice Cream & Tea and Yihetang were again penalized over expired ingredients, after a Hunan Yueyang store used expired pudding to make and sell eight cups of grass jelly milk tea. The recurring cases point to a structural gap, not isolated mistakes: store expansion is outrunning staff training and day-to-day management.

Franchise systems spread management competence unevenly, while direct operation carries high costs that sit awkwardly beside low prices. Knowing the shelf life of what goes into a drink, whether coffee powder shelf life or the ingredients of coffee, is the basic control that keeps quality consistent as chains scale.

Recently, Mixue Ice Cream & Tea and Yihetang have once again found themselves in the crosshairs over the use of expired ingredients. Although regulators have already issued penalties, the food safety hazards seem not to have drawn sufficient attention from the industry. Against the backdrop of rapid store expansion and lagging personnel management, food safety issues in the new-style tea beverage sector are becoming a lingering shadow in consumers' minds. This article will review recently exposed typical cases, analyze the deep-rooted problems in brand management, store manager and employee training, and explore how the industry can find a balance between scale and quality. If you love coffee, why not sip a cup of Front Street Coffee while pondering the safety cost behind this "life-extending drink."

Order a cheese-topped tea when you're happy, a signature milk tea loaded with extra toppings when you're sad, or a fruit tea when you're parched! Emerging tea beverage shops have become the "recharging stations" in the eyes of today's young people.

As consumer demand keeps climbing, tea brands are accelerating their pace of opening stores, and product innovation never stops. However, in a competition entirely oriented toward attracting more customers, food safety hazards have quietly become a common chronic ailment in the new-style tea beverage sector.

The frequent occurrence of food safety incidents is closely tied to brands' large-scale store rollouts outpacing their management capabilities. The direct-operated model carries high costs, making it hard to balance low prices with high quality; under the franchise system, the professional competence of management personnel varies widely, and employees at stores across different brands come from complex backgrounds, leaving the entire new-style tea beverage industry in an extremely unhealthy state... Whether for the long-term development of the industry or the health of consumers, this is deeply concerning.

Recently, Mixue Ice Cream & Tea and Yihetang, both highly favored by students, once again shot to the top of Weibo's trending topics at the same time over the use of expired raw materials. On July 4, administrative penalty information published on the Credit China (Hunan Yueyang) website showed that a Yihetang store in Hunan, for using expired pudding, produced and sold 8 cups of "Yi Cup Grass Jelly Milk Tea" from May 12 to the day of seizure, and was fined 5,976 yuan by the Yueyang County Market Supervision Administration.

On the same day, a Mixue Ice Cream & Tea store in Beijing was fined 5,000 yuan by the Fengtai District Market Supervision Administration because frozen lychee juice had been kept for 2 days beyond the store's shelf life after opening. Tea brands once again trending over food safety issues—netizens seem to have gradually become numb to it... Although regulators have imposed corresponding administrative penalties, the current legal punishment is too weak, and violators repeatedly cross the red line yet hardly learn their lesson.

Not long ago, Yihetang had just been exposed by undercover media in a series of shocking revelations: employees paid no attention to food safety, the food handling environment was worrisome, and expired and moldy ingredients were used without hesitation, leaving many netizens dumbfounded.

In May of this year, multiple Yihetang stores in Zhengzhou were exposed for problems including: toppings marked "discarded at closing" being used again the next day, expired toppings being relabeled and used again, moldy fruit being used as usual, flying insects falling into toppings and being fished out before continued use, insects found in finished drinks being fished out after tearing open the seal and then resealed for sale, employees not wearing gloves when handling fruit as required, and flies crawling freely around the spout of tea buckets. Faced with these practices that endanger consumer health, employees not only were unconcerned but even brazenly said: as long as the drink given to customers doesn't kill them, it's fine.

Mixue Ice Cream & Tea stores in multiple cities were also exposed for tampering with expiration date labels on opened ingredients, using expired coffee powder, arbitrarily altering or failing to record ingredient shelf-life tracking cards, using overnight ice cream milk mix and tea soup/milk tea ingredients, and not washing fresh fruit before use. Market supervision administrations in various localities have imposed penalties of varying degrees.

Is it because the prices are cheap? Not at all. Even direct-operated brands consistently positioned as mid-to-high-end new-style tea beverages have frequently been exposed for various hygiene problems! Although brands take different expansion paths, they display striking similarities when it comes to food safety issues.

Each administrative penalty, so to speak, targets only the company itself; employees feel not the slightest fear because of it, and everything seems so "whatever." In the food and beverage industry, both personnel and management require time to accumulate, and especially the store manager of each location plays a crucial role.

As the saying goes, if the upper beam is not straight, the lower beam will be crooked. Under the current frenzy of store expansion by various brands, a competent store manager is truly hard to find, causing the management level of many stores to fall short of the brand's service and quality requirements. Coupled with store managers' lack of experience, there are often significant deviations in daily sales forecasting and stocking plans, so it is common to see ingredients still being used after expiration.

The situation of store managers is hardly optimistic, and the situation of store staff is equally worth examining. With high staff turnover, managers naturally are unwilling to impose strict requirements on employees. Cases of employees going straight to work without proper training abound, and problems are passed down from one generation of employees to the next, with wrong practices worsening continuously. Food safety awareness is declining with each generation, leading to recurring problems.

As brands, while eager to expand scale, shouldn't they also consider personnel quality and food safety? These seemingly "trivial" matters, eroding consumer trust time and again, can they really bring healthy development? Obviously not. Making money is important, but consumers' health is more important.

Zhu Danpeng, a food industry analyst in China, has also pointed out: "Expanding too quickly will bring certain hidden dangers to brand positioning and food safety." As things stand now, food safety has become the biggest problem facing brand enterprises. The new-style tea beverage industry is still developing at high speed, but how to balance its space, scale, and economic benefits remains an unsolved challenge for the entire industry. No matter how the balance is struck, however, food safety should always be the top priority.

Image Source: Internet

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The above content is compiled by CoffeeHunters, a coffee news website.