People who enjoy beverages were horrified two weeks ago when we shared the story of a woman in Utah who drank sweet tea laced with degreaser when a restaurant employee mistook a lye-based cleaner for sugar. Now something similar has happened in Colorado, where an employee mistook cleaning solution for vanilla syrup and served up a cleaning chemical shake to a 7-year-old boy.

A mother and son stopped at the drive-thru at the Dairy Queen in Thornton, Colorado, and the boy said that his shake tasted funny, like his tongue was burning. His mom took a sip and discovered that the kid was right. He was right: it was definitely not vanilla-flavored. “I took a drink of it and tasted something very ‘chemically,’ and then my mouth and throat started burning,” she told the local Fox affiliate.

She returned to the store, where the manager refused to issue a refund for the contaminated shakes. That was just as well: the family’s next stop was the hospital. Later, a district manager contacted them and explained that someone mixed up a vanilla syrup bottle that was being cleaned with a full one, and that’s where the degreaser shakes came from.

It gets even worse: other customers contacted the TV station in Denver that originally covered this story, claiming that the same thing had happened to them. Maybe that’s why the Dairy Queen imposed their “no refunds for degreaser shakes” policy?

By the way, the woman in Utah who drank lye-laced iced tea has recovered, and was released from the hospital earlier this week.

We really hope that this doesn’t become the next accidental trend in food service, like when restaurants served booze-laced beverages to by accident children over and over in 2011 and 2012.

Dairy Queen management: Cleaning solution got into customers’ vanilla shakes [Fox31 Denver]

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