Pret a Manger was fined $1 million after an employee was trapped in a freezer for more than 2 hours and thought she was going to die

• A Pret a Manger worker was stuck in a freezer at a London store for over two hours in just jeans and a t-shirt.
• The worker was “in a state of distress and believing she was going to die,” Westminster City Council said.
• She was treated for suspected hypothermia. The British coffee chain was fined $1 million on Tuesday.

British coffee shop chain Pret a Manger was fined £800,000 (just over $1 million) after an employee was trapped in a freezer for more than two hours at one of its London stores and was later treated for suspected hypothermia.

The employee at Pret’s London Victoria Coach Station store was trapped in a walk-in commercial freezer typically set to around 0 degrees Fahrenheit, Westminster City Council said in a press release.

The worker, who was wearing just jeans and a t-shirt, tried to keep warm by moving around but her breathing gradually became restricted and she started to lose sensation in her thighs and feet, the Council said.

“To try and keep warm, she tore up a cardboard box containing chocolate croissants to use as cover from the ventilator blowing out cold air but found that her hands were too cold and painful to break the box apart,” the Council wrote.

After spending around two and a half hours stuck in the freezer, the worker was eventually found by a colleague. She was “in a state of distress and believing she was going to die,” the Council said. The worker was then taken to hospital where she was treated for suspected hypothermia, the Council said. A spokesperson for Pret told Insider that the employee was discharged from hospital the same day. She has since returned to her job at Pret, working as a team leader.

An investigation by the Council’s health and safety team found that Pret didn’t have a suitable risk assessment for employees working in temperature-controlled environments. It also said that it found that Pret had received other callouts related to defective or frozen push buttons in the previous 19 months, including one at the same store in Victoria Coach Station in January 2020 when a worker was trapped in the walk-in freezer after the internal door-release mechanism broke.

At Westminster Magistrates’ Court on Tuesday, Pret pleaded guilty to a health and safety offense and was ordered to pay £800,000, reduced by the district judge from an initial £1.6 million ($2 million) because the company had entered an early guilty plea and had advanced mitigation.

“We are incredibly sorry for our colleague’s experience and understand how distressing this must have been,” the Pret spokesperson told Insider. “We have carried out a full review and have worked with the manufacturer to develop a solution to stop this from happening again. Following the incident, we have revisited all our existing systems and where appropriate, enhanced these processes, and have cooperated fully with Westminster City Council’s investigation.”

As of December 2022, the coffee and sandwich chain had around 550 stores, with the vast majority in the UK – especially London – but also in other markets including the US, France, Dubai, and Hong Kong.