The encyclopedia · Sales & Retail · Operational decision · 2025-03-14
Mixue franchise caught using overnight lemon, flies in the cups, on 3·15
3·15 exposé caught a Mixue franchise reusing overnight lemon-orange slices at room temp, flies in the cup lids — the 46,000-store chain was put on 立案调查.
Mixue Group · 2025-03-14
What happened
On 2025-03-14, ahead of China's 3·15 consumer-rights day, a TV exposé (broadcast by 湖北经视) caught a Mixue (蜜雪冰城) franchise at 宜昌凝聚新天地 reusing leftover lemon and orange slices to make its signature drinks — 冰鲜柠檬水 and 棒打鲜橙.
Store staff saved the day's unused lemon and orange slices, at first in cups hidden in a lower shelf, then tipped into a stainless steel bucket left at ROOM TEMPERATURE in a back-corner of the store, deliberately out of the monitoring cameras' view — one said they hid it because they were 'afraid the company would see'. Flies flew around the contaminated worktop and even inside the cup lids, which staff said would be reused the next day to cover fresh fruit. One employee admitted, 'so I won't drink it myself anymore'.
The Yichang market regulator (副局长王贵际) arrived to find the store mid-renovation, and in a second-floor warehouse found leftover raw materials with suspected label violations, which were seized; a case investigation (立案调查) was filed, and the regulator said it would inspect similar stores across the district.
The store manager blamed the employees as rule-breakers ('our requirement is to throw away anything unused'), said he could not watch every hour, and promised tighter supervision. Mixue by then operated more than 46,000 stores worldwide.
Why it happened
- A low-price, high-volume franchise model pushes individual stores to cut costs at the margin, and overnight fruit is a cheap shortcut
- Monitoring-camera blind spots let a cost-saving habit grow into a hygiene lapse that survived until a national watchdog day exposed it
- With 46,000 stores run on thin margins, one store's shortcut became a brand-wide crisis the moment it was filmed
The lesson
Franchise empires scale success and risk together — one store's hidden shortcut was enough to put the whole 46,000-store brand under investigation on China's biggest consumer-watchdog day.
Aftermath
After the 2025-03-14 exposé, the Yichang regulator seized suspicious raw materials and filed a case investigation (立案调查), pledging to check similar stores; the fine was not yet settled. Mixue's head office said it would ban the use of overnight fruit and require stores to destroy unsold ingredients at closing, a response some consumers read as slower than the damage. The incident underlined how a franchise's scale converts a single store's cost-saving habit into a national brand and food-safety risk.
Sources
- 腾讯新闻 — 蜜雪冰城又被曝使用隔夜柠檬片和橙子切片 宜昌市监副局长带队调查 (2025-03-15)
- 搜狐 — 蜜雪冰城回应3·15隔夜水果事件：禁止使用隔夜水果，要求门店闭店销毁 (2025-03-19)
spotted an error? The club wants to know.
More like this
Din Tai Fung lost its whole North China network when the license broke
Shangshangqian — Joker Xue's hotpot chain — closed its last store after 14 years
Häagen-Dazs closed 92 China stores in a year — and handed the rest to a tea chain
Somewhere, someone solved the problem this company failed at. 2nd Opinion →
Comments · 0
Sign in to join the comments.