You’ve probably purchased a big bottle or gallon of water and left it inside of your room or car for days, weeks, or even months.
And while many scientists would probably tell you that drinking water from a plastic bottle that’s been left in the sun/exposed to heat is probably a bad idea, you’ve probably never seen a visible biological growth in said bottle occur by letting it sit somewhere.
Which is probably why a TikToker named Brynn (@brynnnniethepooh) was so shocked to see what happened to the H20 she poured from a Wendy’s fountain soda machine that she left in her vehicle for a week.
Brynn says in her TikTok, “If I ever try to drink from one of those machines that has the touch screen to where you select your drink ever again, somebody shoot me. I will never do it again.”
@brynnnniethepooh It was wendy’s idk why i said arbys #fyp #viral #foryou #contaminatedwater #help #wendys ♬ original sound – Brynn
She then continues with her story explaining why she’s taking such a hard stance against this specific kind of fountain soda machine: “My car was having some issues so I went into an Arby’s to get some water and this has been sitting in my car for about a week. I don’t know what is in there, they’re like… spores. And I’m horrified. Can someone on science TikTok tell me what this is and I will go ahead and tell y’all there was other water in here before that was completely emptied out and gone by the time I filled it up with this. So this is the water from Arby’s. I don’t know if it it’s from the machine. I don’t know if it’s from sitting in the heat. But I ain’t never seen water do that. So something ain’t right.”
While Brynn names the restaurant as Arby’s in her TikTok video, she clarifies in a caption for the clip that the incident actually occurred in a Wendy’s: “It was wendy’s idk why i said arbys”
In the comments section, it appears that folks had similar experiences at other fast food chains, like this one user who wrote: “I went to a zaxbys and complained about the smell around the same machine, they said, ‘Oh probably because we don’t clean it.’”
A former self-described Jack in the Box employee stated in the comments that despite routinely cleaning the fountain soda machine and cleaning the nozzles, mold would inevitably get in areas of the machine that wouldn’t get properly washed: “Every soda machine. I worked at jack in the box and I would clean them daily but the mold goes up inside the machines. Changing nozzles doesn’t help.”
Someone else remarked that this is a widespread problem in all fountain soda machines: “yeahh.. that’s every soda machine everywhere… they don’t get cleaned”
However, there was one Panera worker who said in the comments section that they go through great lengths in order to ensure that the fountain beverage machines were properly cleaned: “At my Panera we wash our drink knobs every night and scrub the machine about every week”
But there were plenty of horror stories that would only seem to confirm Brynn’s suspicions about soda fountain dispensers: “i worked at whataburger and they never made us wash the nozzles for soda machines and one day a big roach came out from one of the nozzles”
So what was in there? Mold commonly grows in water when it’s been still, or it could have been soda remnants from cross-stream use that colored the water. Either way, the source seems to be the soda plumbing itself.
The Daily Dot has reached out to Wendy’s via email and Brynn via TikTok comment for further information.
