I was making lunch today. After I opened a can of famous brand tuna I noticed what looked like a piece of bone inside. It was white, roundish, about the thickness and diameter of a nickel, with a hole in the middle. I assumed it was a vertebrae or something like that. “Cool,” I said to myself.
But I was wrong. After I cleaned it up, I noticed it was really some broken-off plastic industrial part. There were a few minor cracks in it and a sheer line where it must’ve been attached to the rest of whatever it was once part of.
Okay, now what do I do? Nothing? Report it? Call a lawyer and sue somebody? To be fair, no real harm was done; still, people should have the expectation that their tuna will come industrial junk-free.
I’ve still got the can, and it has a number on it. I may even still have the receipt.
If it didn’t make you sick, forget it. You don’t want to be another one of those assholes who try to make your fortune by sueing some company with deep pockets…do you?
Actually, writing the company wouldn’t be a bad idea. They’d probably be grateful and send you a coupon for free cans of tuna. Sans plastic parts, of course!
I have never quite gotten that. How does it make sense that you tell a company that their product sucks and somehow they decide to make it up to you by offering more of what you just told them you think sucks?
They figure that you didn’t think your product sucked when you bought it – perhaps because you’ve bought it many times before and it was A-OK – so you get one bad batch, and they want to say, “We’re not really like that! Please — try us again!”
Write the company. At the very least they’ll probably send you coupons for free schwag. I did that with a company that makes a nice organic salad. One of their leaves kept going moldy long before the expiry date. This happened to me on two occasions, so I complained. They sent me a cheque back for the amount of the salads.
Okay, not exactly free schwag, and it wasn’t plastic bits, but at least they responded.
Speaking as someone who designs equipment used in manufacturing plants, take the plastic piece and send it back to the company. They are going to want to track down what machine it fell off of and come up with some way of preventing it from happening again. If they don’t hear about it, they have no way of preventing it from happening again.
By the way, none of my stuff is used to make tuna, so don’t blame me.
I’ve worked in a foods company, and we had this sort of thing happen regularly.
Here is what I would do:
Call the tuna company. There’s probably a toll-free number on the can.
They will apologize, and ask if anyone was hurt from this. Then they will ask for that number on the side of the can. They may ask you to mail that plastic part back to them. Then they will thank you, and mail you some coupons good for a couple free cans of their tuna. (And they will enter your name & address in a data file, to catch scammers who claim this regularly, trying to get the free food. Yes, there are people who make a habit of this!)
The company will use the lot number to determine where and when this can was packed. They keep statistics, and watch for such problems happening more frequently than normal, and investigate. Could be one packing machine out of adjustment, one worker not following procedures, one maintenance guy not checking machines carefully, etc. But they want to find the problem, and fix it. They will also look at the part you send back, to help identify the source of the problem.
It’s very unlikely that the company will recall that whole batch for a problem like this. That isn’t something poisonous or dangerous inside that can. It sounds like a plastic bushing or washer from a machine that fell into it. That happens quite frequently. That’s why such parts are made of food-grade plastic, or non-toxic metal. Frankly, even if you had swallowed that piece, it would have done you no harm. (Just passed thru, and come out all right at the other end.) Even the lubrication in machines in food plants is often an edible lubricant, similar to cooking oil – in case some of it happens to drip onto the product, it doesn’t hurt the customer.
And I would certainly go ahead and eat the rest of the tuna. Unless it looks obviously contaminated or something. Food companies work pretty hard to keep their food safe, even in the inevitable cases like this.
