Melbourne family say they found maggots in Aldi chicken tenders
UPDATE: Aldi says that live maggots found by a Melbourne family in chicken tenders they bought at the store couldn’t possibly have been there during the manufacturing or distribution process.
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A MELBOURNE man claims his daughter found maggots in Aldi-bought chicken tenders.
Bill Johnson, from Tooradin, told radio station 3AW that he was at work when he got a call from his daughter, who was halfway through her meal when she realised something had survived the freezer and the oven.
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He said he could barely believe it until he saw it with his own eyes. The creatures are believed to be about 3mm long and the same colour as the crumb on the chicken tender.
“She wasn’t physically sick but she was pretty disgusted as you can imagine,” he told Neil Mitchell.
Mr Johnson said the incident happened on January 30. He said he phoned Aldi and was told he would receive a call back but heard nothing until he phoned again to make a report.
It’s not the first time Aldi has been rocked by such an incident.
In 2015, a shopper claimed she found a maggot in a jar of red cabbage she bought from an Aldi store in Cheltenham.
Earlier that year, a couple said they found a maggot in a jar of tomato paste they bought at the Aldi store in Abbotsford.
Last November, a Melbourne fast-food customer found maggots inside his original recipe chicken that he bought from a KFC in Preston.
The City of Casey confirmed it is investigating a food safety complaint it received on Friday.
In a statement, Aldi said it had been in contact with Mr Johnson and had started an investigation with its supplier.
It said it had established this was an isolated incident and that an independent food scientist, Skye Blackburn, had examined the video and said it was extremely unlikely that the contamination had happened during the manufacturing or distribution process.
“I believe it would be extremely unlikely that the larvae of the fly would survive the cooking and freezing process associated with producing this product,” she said.
She said the larvae in the video look to be two days old but that the product was manufactured on December 12.
“The larvae also appear to be moving very quickly, which indicates they are quite warm and therefore have not been in a fridge or freezer previously.”