Pictures and video of South African KFC employees washing raw chicken on the ground outside the fast food restaurant have surfaced online.
A video (shown below) of the two staff members was taken by a resident at an apartment overlooking the fast food restaurant.
“Like you, we were really shocked to see the pictures posted from KFC Braamfontein, and at first couldn’t believe what we were seeing,” KFC said in a statement. “We immediately closed the store while we investigated and were extremely relieved to find out that this was discarded chicken, never intended to be sold.”
The chicken in the pictures didn’t meet KFC’s standard and was therefore set aside for disposal. The franchise requires employees to discard chicken before breading it to avoid waste, and the employees in the pictures were apparently attempting to hide the breading waste from managers by hosing it down.
“The Braamfontein store had set it aside for disposal. This is a good thing, but the way in which they handled the product to be disposed of definitely did not follow our procedures,” KFC noted.
Despite releasing a statement on Facebook, public outrage was so great following the release of the video that KFC published a full-page advertisement in the Sunday World newspaper apologizing for the incident.
KFC Africa managing director Doug Smart noted that he’d never seen anything like this before, describing the incident as a “watershed” case.
Photo Credit: ENCA