While it’s always unfortunate to find something in your food that you weren’t expecting, at least in one recent case that something was never alive: a McDonald’s customer in California got more than raisins in her breakfast when she found a piece of broken kitchen equipment in her oatmeal.
The woman tells 10 News (warning: link contains video that autoplays) that she’s been getting oatmeal at McDonald’s every day, spending around $90 a month on her routine. On Tuesday, she spotted a big piece of red plastic in her bowl.
“At first, I thought, ‘What could that be in there?’ And then I looked a little bit more and thought, ‘How could the girl not have noticed that?'” she said.
The words “lift for hot water” on the piece of plastic clued her in to the object’s origin: it was apparently a lever that broke off a hot water machine at the restaurant.
Even if it’s not worms or snails, having her breakfast contaminated with kitchen equipment that’s been handled by employees was not okay with the customer, or her daughter.
“[It]’s dirty, it’s filthy. That just makes me sick,” the daughter told the station.
The woman brought it back to the McDonald’s location, and said a worker told her, “Oh yeah, I was looking for that on the ground.” The restaurant apologized to the customer and offered her a free meal, but didn’t provide an explanation for how no one noticed a handle falling into a bowl of food. Her morning routine will now change, as she and her daughter say they won’t be eating fast food in general for the time being.
The franchisee that operates the McDonald’s in question issued a statement on the incident, again, without giving a reason for how such a thing could happen.
“The health and safety of customers and employees is always a top priority. We place great emphasis on safety and sanitation standards to ensure we deliver great tasting, quality food to all our customers, and have apologized to [the customer] that we didn’t meet those standards yesterday. We take these matters very seriously and are taking action to ensure this doesn’t happen again.”
Woman finds big red object in McDonald’s oatmeal [10 News]
by Mary Beth Quirk via Consumerist