A hotpot restaurant in southwestern China has become famous for all the wrong reasons after a video showed one of its workers picking up used cooking oil from a trash can on the side of the road. The incident, which happened on August 18, has made people very angry and prompted major concerns about food safety.
A passerby photographs a woman in the restaurant’s uniform using a ladle to collect wasted oil from a swill bin into a plastic bucket in a viral video. When the person filming asked her about it, she said, “I just started working here,” which only made people more suspicious that the restaurant was recycling waste oil, a process known as “gutter oil” in China that has long been tied to food safety concerns.
Gutter oil is a daily reality in China.
— Pseudo Prophet (@PseudoProphet) August 27, 2025
This is not going to change anytime soon,
No matter how much the CCP trolls keep trying to fool you into believing otherwise. pic.twitter.com/Xs3s3Tt2Io
Clarifications from the restaurant and the government
After a lot of people were angry, the restaurant’s manager, Xiao, sent a public statement to Red Star News. “She had only been there for a few days.” Xiao told the South China Morning Post (SCMP) that the oil she gathered was not for use in our restaurant. Instead, she was collecting it to sell to a sanitation company that recycles waste oil.
The employee in question, Zhang, also wrote a statement by hand. “I want to make it clear that the video going around online was my own doing and has nothing to do with the hotpot restaurant,” her statement said. “I took the oil for myself to sell.”
Local authorities have since backed up the restaurant’s story. The Jiulong Subdistrict Market Supervision Office looked into the matter and discovered that the restaurant was legitimately selling its used oil to a licensed sanitation company for recycling. The investigation found that Zhang had apparently seen this happen and tried to gather the oil that had been thrown out so she could sell it for her own benefit.
More Food Safety Issues
This event shows that there are still problems with food safety in China. The Beijing News said in July 2024 that tanker trucks that had been used to move chemicals and fuel were now being utilized to move food oils and syrup without being cleaned properly. In June 2023, there was another episode that made people all around the country angry: a college cafeteria served a rice dish that was said to have the head of a deceased mouse in it.