Fake Instant Starbucks Coffee Busted in Beijing

China's food and drug regulator has begun investigating fake instant Starbucks coffee, as counterfeits circulate in China's supermarkets.

Supermarkets in Nanjing, East China's Jiangsu Province and Beijing were found selling fake instant Starbucks coffee, involving well-known supermarket chains - Greenland Direct Global Goods and Hualian Supermarket in Nanjing, and Carrefour in Beijing, The Beijing News reported on Monday.

Some supermarkets including Carrefour in Beijing took the fake coffee off their shelves on Sunday, the report said. 

The complaint reporting hotline of the food and drug administration of the Beijing Municipality received complaints, and the food and drug supervision department has launched an investigation, according to the report. 

"The instant coffee can only be bought at Starbucks coffee shops and its flagship shop on online retail platform Tmall," a staff member from a Beijing-based Starbucks coffee shop told the Global Times on Monday.

The counterfeit "Starbucks VIA Instant packets" are produced by Guangzhou Baiyi Food Trading Company.

The food company has never been authorized to sell Starbucks instant coffee as a distributor, The Beijing News reported, quoting a staff member from Starbucks China.

The caramel latte flavor of the genuine instant coffee sold at Starbucks stores has a box of four packets, but the fake one sold in the supermarket has five packets per box.

The Starbucks staff said an anti-counterfeit label and an image of a porcelain cup are attached on the coffee package, which is different from the counterfeit one printed with a glass on the package.

Its shelf life is labeled as eight months while the counterfeit is labeled 18 months, according to the staff.

Selling counterfeit Starbucks instant coffee is not an isolated case in China. Police from Wuxi, Jiangsu Province arrested people suspected of producing the counterfeit Starbucks instant coffee at a residential building in Guangzhou in January 2019, media reported.

The workshop was rudimentary, messy and did not have any sanitary protection measure, according to a video from Lizhipo, a media platform affiliated with Jiangsu TV.

Source: globaltimes

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