I regularly eat canned tuna. I once opened a can and proceeded to eat it. Ugh. I only eat tuna packed in water, and mistakenly bought it packed in oil.
And I once accidently bought decaf ground coffee instead of regular coffee.
As others have suggested, they literally can’t resell returned refrigerated food items. It’s a violation of food safety codes.
Try making paneer cheese with it - boil it with a tablespoon or 2 of lemon juice or vinegar until it separates, then strain it. Press the curds into patties. Look up recipes online, it’s very simple. Websites also call it homemade ricotta. You might want to add some butter to the pot for the fat content, but I don’t know whether it’ll incorporate.
It happens a few times. Usually when it does, I’m extremely cautious when buying the same item again.
One example is the time I accidentally bought the Zatarain’s jambalaya mix with cheese instead of the regular. It was nasty and I will never make that same mistake again.
Another time I wasn’t paying attention when buying a jar of pickle relish and bought “sugar free”, which had that disgusting artificial sweetener taste.
A number of years ago I was at a market that specialized in Asian foods. I was in the aisle for sauces and picked up a bottle of hot sauce. TMI, but I needed to use the bathroom a number times after I put the sauce on some foods I was eating. I then took a closer look at the label. It said it is used for stir-frying. So I learned something: if a sauce is for stir-frying, it might also mean it needs to be cooked in order to safely consume it.
Good idea. I’ll try that.
My husband is notorious for buying the wrong stuff. In one trip he bought strawberry preserves instead of jam and giant Milk Bones instead of the small ones. The dogs each get a small Milk Bone before bed. He just blindly picks things off the shelves. That’s why I do all of the shopping.
A few months ago I accidentally bought garlic salt instead of garlic powder and, well, salty garlic bread really isn’t my thing, apparently.
The item in question was milk.
Yeah, I’ve been really careful about the shampoo bottle ever since the day I found myself trying to wash my hair with conditioner.
The bottles were almost identical. And I don’t use that conditioner.
Yeah, I’ve learned to look extra hard at “sugar free” labels, even or maybe especially when I’m buying something I don’t want any sweetener at all in, sugar or otherwise.
(If I do want sweetener in something, I don’t want the artificials. They taste off to me. But I’ve also learned to look for sugars listed under three or more different names – total sugars are likely to be higher than I want even if I want some in that product; plus which I think that trick is annoyingly deceptive.)
Any fat in your kitchen arsenal can help restore that luscious whole milk vibe. Chicken schmaltz? Bacon grease? Duck fat? Lard? A dollop of Crisco? Slap it in and sip with pride. Got milk? Nah—I’ve got something tastier. 
I once bought liquid dish soap (the kind made for hand-washing dishes, like Dawn or Palmolive) by mistake, instead of dishwasher detergent. I figured soap is soap, so put it in the dishwasher and fired it up. Bubble explosion—like a middle school science fair volcano! It leaked out all over my kitchen floor.
Before I realized that maple-flavored breakfast meat was a thing, I accidentally bought a large and pricey ham steak that was strongly flavored with fake maple. I was annoyed enough to take it back to the store and gripe, and they gave me my money back. Gah! If I want maple-y food, I’ll have some pancakes or waffles with maple syrup.
I also once accidentally bought some vegan frozen breakfast sausage sandwiches. I didn’t realize I was in the vegetarian sector of the frozen foods aisle, and just reached for what looked like real sausage and egg “McMuffins”. Bleh.
And what’s with the corn and flour blend tortillas? I didn’t realize they had started doing that and I bought what I thought was plain ol’ corn tortillas, but they were a blend. They didn’t fry up right at all for taco shells, nor did they taste right.
Yes- but the person I replied to said “Any food item” without making any distinction between refrigerated and non refrigerated items.
Ah. Missed that, sorry.
I don’t know whether laws make that distinction, though. (Some non-refrigerated items might be easy to mess up otherwise.) And it might vary state by state.
I just recently did the exact same thing. I had to rinse it in running water to try to wash off the oil. But the cat loved it.
The wrong items I buy sometimes are items that reall I want, and they’re on sale! Great! But then I get it home, only to find it expires the next day. Like a big tub of Country Crock that will take over a month to finish. I’ve learned to carefully check expiration dates since then, but still get surprised once in a while.
On two separate occasions I have accidentally bought spicy V-8 instead of my usual low-salt variety. Mixing it with non-spicy V-8 made it tolerable. Barely.
Funny, I was just pinching bags of coffee last night. The grocery store I was shopping at had 15-20 mixed bags, each 10-12 oz and super-marked down to $4 and under. I quickly sorted into two heaps of ground vs bean by feel to narrow down the selection.
Wrong Food Item: I bought 200 of the mini 4 cup (?) coffee filters by mistake. I guess I could use them as rough napkins or maybe food safe firestarters?
I wanted to try a particular fajita seasoning that was recommended to me. I found a packet available on Amazon and was shocked at the price but, since I really wanted to try it, I went ahead and ordered it. What arrived was a box of 32 packets of fajita seasoning. Yeah. I didn’t look at that one very closely. I don’t have fajitas very often so it will take me literally years to go through that case.
The only times I have purchased the wrong food thing is when I’m a hurry, usually in the early AM when I stop at a convenience store on my way to work. I’ve bought full-sugar Gatorades instead of the Zeros and lactose-free milk instead of the real stuff. It’s annoying but not exactly a crisis as there’s always someone at work willing to use what I bought by mistake.
When I do our regular grocery shopping – and I’m the one who does 99% of our shopping – I follow a list that rarely deviates from our usual staples so buying the wrong thing basically never happens.
My dad does most of our grocery shopping, and he has bought vanilla or berry flavored yogurt several times when I needed plain yogurt for a recipe. Also probably low fat when it should have been full fat.
And one time, I asked for chorizo, and he didn’t buy it, because he spelled it as thorizo on the list.
IME mistake purchases make much better trash can filler-uppers than anything else. Struggling to find an alternate use for a $3 goof is simply piling guilt and inconvenience on yourself. Don’t do that. If its edible, feed it to a pet if you have one, or to the dumpster if you don’t. Even if you’re on a very tight budget, figuring out some way to (mis)use a mistaken purchase doesn’t put the $3 back in your wallet. You might get a few cents of value out of it, but probably not.
The vast majority of my goofed purchases come from slightly mis-filed merch. e.g. I’m buying my preferred brand of PB (Smucker’s Natural). I prefer chunky and have no desire to eat creamy. The two products are shelved side by side and differ only in the small banner “CHUNKY” in blue or “CREAMY” in green atop otherwise identical labels. I find the batch of chunkies, grab three, and of course the third one behind the other two is an unnoticed creamy that some previous customers pushed into the center of the chunky pile.
It should be a criminal offense to disguise low-fat or other mutant variations in very similar packaging to the real stuff. The packaging should be a radically different colour. To be fair, most manufacturers do this fairly well, it’s the minority that don’t that piss me off.
I very nearly fell for the “wrong food item” a few weeks ago when my nearby supermarket was out of Chapman’s vanilla ice cream sandwiches. Searching for them in another store, I was delighted to find them and happily put the box in my cart. It was only by the grace of God that I happened to notice that it said “frozen yogurt”! The damn things weren’t even ice cream at all, but had exactly the same box art as the genuine article! Back on the shelf it went.