Being a Starbucks barista is hard enough. I can’t imagine having to deal with teens wanting an Instagramable drink, Uber Eats orders, and people wanting fifty different modifications to their latte.
Now, Starbucks employees are speaking out about a mysterious, “forbidden blue” drink that they’ve been asked to make recently and as you can imagine, they’re annoyed with it.
There’s a lot of things that I can’t understand about kids today.
I don’t understand their need to document everything they do on social media. I don’t understand the food “trends” that they get obsessed with. And, I sure as heck don’t understand their need to prank fast-food employees.
Starbucks baristas get it the worst, by far. People can’t enough of the ‘bucks!
Now, the coffee shop employees are opening up about the unusual drink request they’ve been getting lately, and it’s a real head scratcher.
Requests to make bright blue drinks known as the “tropical drink,” “tropical refresher,” and “forbidden refresher” have been coming in droves.
Speaking with Business Insider current and former baristas are saying the drinks have a few things in common —one, they all appear to share the same blue hue. two, they’re not on the menu, and three, the blue color can’t be achieved with any of the coffee shops usual ingredients.
Apparently, the drink has gained recent popularity from a TikTok video that has gone viral.
The Starbucks workers told the publication that customers had asked them to make the blue drinks while showing TikTok videos of it.
Some coffee shop staffers speculated that the blue color came from Urnex, a cleaning fluid used on coffee-making equipment, or blue Gatorade.
A Starbucks spokesperson told Business Insider: “This is not a real drink and not available in our stores. We have rigorous food safety procedures in place of which use of a chemical in a beverage violates these standards.”
“We are not aware of any incidents in which a customer was intentionally or unintentionally served one of these beverages.”
Starbucks fans may recall other blue drunks popping up on social media over the years, and as it turns out, they were all either Gatorade or Urnex.
“Tricked a bunch of girls that this is the new Starbucks drink,” an Imgur user wrote in 2017. “It’s actually just Gatorade lol.”
Posting a picture of a coffee machine piece being soaked in Urnex, one barista wrote: “Forbidden Gatorade (urnex)” on Reddit last year.
Well, it’s clear some people have just been trolling teens into ordering a “blue drink” but let it be known you shouldn’t ever drink anything that’s blue from Starbucks!
h/t: Business Insider
Last Updated on October 14, 2021 by Anastasia Ross