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
Call the Dutch number for your store, and just pretend to be confused. They do take it seriously and are able to process this regardless. Also, calling several times can help.
Often times companies intentionally under-train some employees so they can’t process some things
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).
Contact Delhaize corporate. Even just from a PR standpoint that manager is an asshat for not accepting the return of a 2 euro product, and corporate might not be happy about it.
Have you tried contacting consumers groups like Test Achats?
I did not reach out to them in this particular case. But I would expect Test Achats to focus on getting me a refund of 2 euros or whatever it is; I would not think Test Achats would do anything to intervene in quality control.
When I have contacted Test Achats in the past, they said something like subscribe to their magazine to become a member, then they will advocate for me on consumer issues. I decided not to subscribe.
Then a few years later I complained about at a consumer issue to a gov agency who then forwarded the complaint to ECCNET, which apparently is the same org as Test Achats. They responded to say they only handle cross-border problems and that anything that is entirely in Belgium (where both the consumer and merchant are in Belgium) is outside of their jurisdiction.
In North America there’s usually a number on the packaging or website you can visit for quality control
It’s likely not something that the customer service rep at the store is trained on.
It might have had that, I don’t know; I don’t have the tin anymore. But indeed, we need to evolve more. Consumers are not going to pay to ship a tin to a producer. Store returns are managed by stores who potentially ship stuff back to their suppliers. In this case a bean-counter refused a return which then caused them to neglect to record a creepy crawly in their own food brand.
Supply chain and quality assurance concerns are usually handled by the manufacturer and distributor, not the end point grocery stores, though. Anything you return to the grocery store is likely simply thrown out and marked as shrink (operating cost of loss), and never reported to the manufacturer or sent back.
If your goal is to let the manufacturer know about quality issues, you need to do that directly. Not through the end point grocery store. They are likely separate corporate entities under the same parent company, in any case, and have little to no communication between each other. The grocery store would be where you could get a refund or exchange, but that would never reach back to the manufacturer.
I am so much more motivated than the typical consumer. My goal is that when someone else (your typical lazy consumer who may only care to get a refund) returns a can of worms to the grocery store, that the grocer have an obligation¹ to record the food quality/security issue and report it in a way that it gets tracked and ideally in a centralised place.
So indeed as I said, we need to evolve more. We have banks hyper-reporting on mere suspicion of something they perceive as off under excessive AML rules as if there is a gun to their head, yet you bring a real live creepy crawly to a grocer and there is minimal action… as you say getting swept under the rug as shrinkage.
¹ or pressure of some kind.
How it -should- be and what actually happens when you return don’t always match up, sadly. Just giving insight into the reality of how it works from experience working in grocery retail.
When you have the money you can probably sue.
