It may be difficult or impossible to control food quality well enough that every container be mealworm-free. But I expect metrics to be kept so someone can monitor whether or not a supply chain is doing something notably reckless.
Delhaize history
Delhaize started off as a food producer who was regarded as a brand of high quality products. Then they became a big grocery store chain. So of course they sell their own products. And in fact I have never seen Delhaize products sold by other stores.
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When I tried to return the rooibos, the CSR asked for a receipt. I did not have one, so he refused. I said: look, it’s brand of the store, so of course it came from here. He argued that it may not have come from /this/ precise store.
I don’t give a shit about getting a 2 euro refund. My whole point was to get the incident recorded so they can look into QA issues. So then I reported this to the food safety authority in Belgium. It’s possible they acted on it, but they sent no acknowledgement. Which effectively signals to consumers they are wasting their time by reporting quality issues.
Is this all normal? I would expect a public health agency to be keen to encourage reports of worms packaged in food.
I think the norm is (sadly enough) to use Twitter. Someone tweets “worm in my food” with a good photo, it gets some attention, then the supplier is forced to try to remedy their embarrassment. This hack doesn’t work for non-Twitter non-Facebook users.
(edit) attached a pic
I mean was it alive or dead? Certain small bugs like that aren’t uncommon to find in dry goods. Things like flour and grains have an acceptable level of bug ‘parts’ in them. The FDA’s acceptable threshold for flour is 75 or less insects fragments per 50 grams of flour. If the mealworm was dead/dried etc I wouldn’t worry so much and I’m not sure what they would do about it, it’s not dangerous to public health
It was alive. It was in the tin for a while too. The tin had a tight fitting lid so there is no way it could have entered after I bought it and put it in my pantry. I did not discover it until about half the roobios was consumed.
(edit) just attached a pic to the OP.
Guess I should phrase it as a food security issue, not food safety, since security is broader and covers shortages. I probably got less “food” because that live worm has a lot more weight per volume than rooibos I was buying. Plus it probably ate some of it. So there’s my courtroom testimony ready to go :)
Ah, yeah that’s kind of odd seems like it hatched inside the tin. I would definitely be weirded out too if it was alive . Weird that they didn’t accept the return
It’s something that should have been recorded and analysed. Perhaps they would discover something, like maybe they should inspect the rooibos before adding the white chocolate (if they are not already).