It's been a terrible few months for McDonald's Japan, as the Asian country's franchise of the famous American fast food chain has gone through a series of food safety issues, from a human tooth in a bag of fries to even problems with the distribution - and this has inevitably ended up in loss.
As Food World News reported in the first days of the year, McDonald's Japan has gone through a streak of scandals in the past few months. The latest of these involved that the company was rationing fries in their Japanese venues due to the fact that they were having issues with the California workers, who export them to the country.
After that, as The Daily Mail reported a month ago, the McDonald's Japan franchise stated that, a few months back, a patron in one of the restaurants had found what ended up being a human tooth in her bag of fries. In the same report, the company admitted that there had been traces of plastic found in some of their items, including Chicken McNuggets and sundaes, and a young boy nearly choked to death due to a piece of hard plastic in his dessert, which was later confirmed to have come from the machine.
Now, Forbes reports that the sales in McDonald's Japan have dropped dramatically - which is hardly surprising at this point. For the first time since the company went public in the Asian country in 2001, the franchise has reported a year of loss following all the mishaps.
Besides the obvious fact that patrons in the country were scared off the restaurants due to the scandals, there were also heavy criticisms to Sarah Casanova, the president and CEO of the restaurants with the golden arches in Japan, as the company failed to apologize for the issues in a timely manner.
According to Reuters, McDonald's Japan's sales took a record nosedive of 39 percent in January 2015 alone, a record for the franchise.