AFAIK, 90 degrees C is the standard temperature for brewing coffee. No idea what McD’s standard for serving it is, but I suspect corporate lawyers would not sign off on a lid that is only certified for 85 degrees if the coffee was brewed at a higher temperature.
The source of ‘silly woman sues Macdonalds for millions spilling hot coffee on herself while driving’ was a real event that has been retold so often that all the pertinent detail was lost – it relates to a policy macdonalds used to have for serving coffee as hot as they possibly could. McD’s had done a bit of market research (back in the days before flat whites and froth-a-chinos) about what constituted ‘a good coffee’ and their coffee was basically very dark brown water. One of the most frequent responses they got was that coffee should be ‘hot’. You’d normally brew fresh coffee at about 90 degrees – by they time its actually brewed and it hits your mug, especially if you have milk in it, its more like 60 degrees which is why you can tentatively put some in your mouth without injury.
But in the face of their market research they decided that hotter coffee was better coffee and made it their target to hand the coffee over as close to 100deg as they could. The problem with that was they were handing a lot of that coffee through the windows of peoples cars. An old lady (who was a passenger not the driver) spilt her coffee while parked – when your in a car seat its very difficult to get out of the seat and out of the scalding liquid quickly and she suffered burns where you really wouldn’t want them that required quite extensive skin grafts. She became aware of other customers who had been injured in the same way and thats when the ‘serve hot as possible’ policy came to light – she suggested they review it. They refused.
Of course in the US you pay for your medical treatment – so in the light of their refusal to review their policy she sued them for her medical costs (often suing is part of the process of claiming on your medical insurance – the insurers want to exhaust all the options for getting someone else to pay before they pay up themselves) which were in the low 10s of thousands.
However in the US its juries not the judge that sets the level of compensation in cases like this and they can award ‘punitive damages’ – make an award that punishes the culprit rather than compensates the victim. Because they’d not heeded warnings and were continuing to do so the decided to set the damages as ‘1c for every cup of coffee McDonalds had sold that day’ which turned out to be a sum over $1m.
