NOIDA: Foreign bodies are displaying an insalubrious knack of showing up in ice cream packs.
Two days after a customer in Mumbai found a portion of a human finger in an ice cream cone he had ordered, a woman in the city on Saturday discovered a dead centipede in a vanilla ice-cream tub that was delivered to her.
The butterscotch cone with the finger part in Mumbai was from Yummo, a lesser-known brand.The tub that came to the Noida home was an Amul product.
Deepa Devi, who lives in Sector 12, said she had ordered an Amul Vanilla Magic tub, worth Rs 195, from e-commerce store Blinkit to make mango shake for her five-year-old son. “Once I opened the tub, I saw a black frozen substance on the ice cream. After it defrosted, I realised it was a dead centipede. Just imagine what would have happened if we had consumed it without checking,” Deepa told TOI.
She said she recorded a video of the ice-cream tub with the centipede and shared it on social media platforms, which has since been shared many times. The tub’s packaging date is April 15, 2024 and expiry date is April 15, 2025.
Blinkit refunded the sum after Deepa submitted a complaint on their app. Customer care officials also told her they had written to Amul. “Amul has reached out to me and said their officials will visit my house on Sunday morning. Blinkit has apologised and refunded the cost of the ice cream tub,” she said.
Though Deepa hasn’t filed a complaint, food safety department officials reached out to her, taking cognisance of her social media post. Noida food safety officer Akshay Goyal said a case was registered against the ice-cream brand, the e-commerce app and the store manager from where the product was ordered.
“We are investigating the matter. We have registered a case under the Food Safety Standard Act, 2006. We will also collect samples of the same ice cream batch from the Blinkit store and send them for lab tests. Depending on the results, further legal action will be taken,” he said.
On June 13, Brendan Ferrao, a 26-year-old Malad-based doctor, found a portion of a human finger with a fingernail on it in a Yummo ice cream he had ordered through the Zepto app. The wrapper had a manufacturing date of May 11, 2024, and an expiry date of May 10, 2025.