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

    • synesthesia@thebrainbin.orgOP
      2·
      4 days ago

      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.