Check your freezer. Perdue Foods is recalling more than 167,000 pounds of frozen chicken nuggets and tenders after some customers reported finding metal wire embedded in the products.

According to Perdue and the U.S. Agriculture Department’s Food Safety and Inspection Service, the recall covers select lots of three products: Perdue Breaded Chicken Tenders, Butcher Box Organic Chicken Breast Nuggets and Perdue Simply Smart Organics Breaded Chicken Breast Nuggets.

FSIS and Perdue determined that some 167,171 pounds (75,827 kilograms) of these products may be contaminated with a foreign material after receiving an unspecified number of customer complaints. In a Friday announcement, Maryland-based Perdue said that the material was “identified in a limited number of consumer packages.”

  • ikidd@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    I’m actually surprised they don’t have metal detectors in their processing line. It’s very inexpensive and a good safeguard for a fairly common problem. Even if you aren’t getting it come in via the animals (broken treatment needles, things they eat), machines fall apart, bearings fail and drop pieces in the product.

    • spicy pancake@lemmy.zip
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      2 months ago

      They probably do. Though, food industry metal detectors have to regularly be calibrated with check wands: plastic bars with very small embedded metal fragments designed to mimic possible contaminants like brush wire, oven conveyor pieces, etc.

      When I was QA at a food plant that used them, there were numerous problems with the metal detectors.

      1. Line operators were haphazardly trained on calibration and how fucking important it is to do it correctly and on time. Lots of operators rushed or skipped calibration and falsified the logs. The fact they were rushed, overworked, and underpaid didn’t help.
      2. The detectors had a high false-positive rate, leading to a “oh it’s probably nothing” attitude.
      3. Management didn’t want to spend ANY money on maintenance and upgrades that would have prevented metal contamination or decreased detection errors.

      To this day I still have a lot of anxiety eating factory food because of the nightmares I witnessed at that place…

        • spicy pancake@lemmy.zip
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          2 months ago

          Could be one batch or many. A “batch” means different things in different food industry contexts and has more to do with ingredient tracking than production timespan

    • Capt. Wolf@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      “It’s not like our chickens are carrying in knives and stabbing people! Why would we need metal detectors?” -Perdue’s finance guy, probably

    • 🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 ℹ️@yiffit.net
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      2 months ago

      Considering how shitty the working conditions at every Foster Farms plant I’ve worked at were, I can’t imagine a business that isn’t as large being better. If it’s cheaper to pay a slap-on-the-wrist fine for harming people with their shitty products than it is to make their products not kill ya, they will keep on killing.

  • andrewta@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    Not sure I see a problem. The doctors keep telling us we need iron and fiber in our diet. This company is just going the extra mile and trying to help out.