Black Ice: Eighty Percent of Beijing's Ice Cubes Coming From Unlicensed Sources

Summer usually means its time to enjoy the outdoors when Beijing weather allows it; have a few friends over to enjoy some barbecue and cool down with a nice home-made ice tea. But it seems, the ice cubes you are probably using may not be from a licensed company as 80 percent of the ice cubes on the market are not from licensed ice factories according to story on Sina (Chinese only) earlier this week.

There are only six QS (Quality Standard) certified companies for edible ice in the Beijing Quality Supervision Bureau database. The "black ice" factories do not meet the food production license requirements and most just buy ice machines, connect to tap water, plug in the power and package them.

Checking a QS Certification
Jenny Wang’s at the Pinnacle Plaza in Shunyi stocks ice cubes from two companies, namely the Beijing Qingquan Dongxin Ice Company and the Beijing Cold Mountain Industrial and Trade Centre. The Cold Mountain Company is not among the list of the six companies certified in Beijing, namely:

• Beijing Hanshanren Ice Factory (北京寒山人制冰厂)
• Beijing Hua Ice Factory (北京华冰制冰厂)
• Beijing Qingquan Dongxin Ice Company (北京清泉东欣制冰有限公司)
• Beijing Kaibo Ice Factory (北京凯博制冰厂, no website available)
• Beijing Bao Luo Xiong Bagged Ice Factory 1st Branch (北京宝罗熊袋装冰有限公司第一分公司)
• The Wall's (China) Company (路雪(中国)有限公司).

We did a search on the National Food Quality Safety Law Enforcement, Supervision and Inquiry Service information system website (Chinese only) and found that there is no QS certificate issued to the Cold Mountain Company. The company declined to comment on their validity of their certification.The Cold Mountain company’s Chinese brand name is 寒山 (hanshan) and has no connection to the 寒山人 (hanshanren) company on the list above. The Beijing Hanshanren Ice company confirmed that they are not affiliated with the Cold Mountain Company after calling them to find out more their products.

There are two ways to check the validity of a QS certification on "National Food" site; one is through the use of the QS certification number stated on the packaging, and the other is using the Chinese name of the company.

This story comes after KFC, McDonald’s and other fast food chains recently made headlines when a CCTV investigative piece exposed the ice cubes they were using were dirtier than toilet water.

Photo: Wikimedia commons

This story originally appeared on beijingkids.com.