Two extra large black Earl Grey teas – just by the sound of her voice, they already know her order. For six years, Angie Field has had the same morning routine. At 7:30 am, she leaves her home in West Gravenhurst and drives down Muskoka Road South before turning left into the McDonald’s drive-through on Bethune Drive. She always orders two teas – one for the morning and one for the afternoon – and then doubles back to her job as the receptionist at Gravenhurst Optometry.
“I know the people there. I know a few of the regulars, and we look forward to it every morning,” said Field in an interview with Muskoka411.
On Fridays, she works half days at the clinic, so she takes her afternoon tea home. Last Friday afternoon, Field was having her last sip of tea as she watched TV at home when she felt something “tickle my lips. I opened my cup, and that’s when I saw the bug. I thought – ‘oh my god, am I going to get sick?'”
Field says after initially being unable to contact the restaurant management, she took to social media to ask her Facebook friends for advice.
“(McDonald’s management) were very upset that I went the social media route,” said Field after speaking with management the next day.
When she later spoke to the owner, he “told me that he has cameras in his drive-through that show the cup, and he can tell that there was nothing in my cup, so whatever came in my cup came from another location. Never apologized, nothing,” said Field.
“There are children that eat there, there’s elderly, there’s immune-compromised people – are we going to get sick?… I never asked for anything monetary. I was asking about my health. That was my concern, and nobody cared.”
Muskoka411 spoke to Tony Makrostergios, the Program Manager of Food Safety at Simcoe Muskoka District Health, and asked how a restaurant should respond to a complaint like this:
“They should take every complaint seriously; we do. We follow up on every complaint within 24 hours (or sooner) depending on the severity,” said Makrostergios
Last year, the Bethune Drive McDonald’s was inspected three times, once on Oct. 18 and twice on Oct.27. There were a few infractions, but they were all ultimately corrected during inspection.
“Looking at these inspections, it’s not a red flag to me,” said Makrostergios.
On Tuesday, the restaurant passed an inspection with no infractions.
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However, this does not prove whether or not the insect did come from the McDonald’s.
“You can’t say definitively either way… the manager of that McDonald’s should make sure that the pest control (protocol) is up to date,” said Makrostergios. “A health inspection is a snapshot in time. We can’t say what happened before we got there, and we can’t say what’s going to happen after.”
Muskoka411 reached out to the Bethune Drive McDonald’s management for comment multiple times and has yet to receive a response.
This week Field’s six-year morning routine had a slight change. She still leaves the house at 7:30 and still drives down Muskoka Road South, but now she turns right instead of left and pulls up to a different drive-through window – “Welcome to Tim Hortons. Can I take your order?”
“Two extra large black Earl Grey teas.”