That is a hex NUT.

I received a 2" hex bolt embedded in a generic rice crispy treat from the vending machine at work. I sent it in to the baker in Chicago and received a letter of apology and a free case of presumably bolt-free crispie treats.

Oh, yea and please pay no attention to the already opened re-sealable packing. Honest we didnt just put this fozen nut right where you could see it in a photo and then re-seal the bag.

I.E. "thats not my finger in the wendy's chili."

@Daytonna: That was my first thought too. Then again, the nut does seem to show an appropriate level of freezer burn.

I have to agree with Daytonna... just tell that person to go return it and there should be no problem.

@Daytonna: Actually, if she had opened it, the plastic at the top would be ripped. You can't just have ziplock bags lying out on the shelves. Otherwise people would be slipping hex nuts in chicken breast filets left and right.

Well, it is a great value, after all. I mean, come on, chicken and a free nut? Score.

By the way, calling it a "hex nut" is somewhat redundant. Almost all nuts are hexagonal. You would only need to label it as something other than a "nut" if it was not a hex nut.

Oh great, now everyone is going to want one!

I'd give my left..umm...arm...for a bonus like that!

(And yes, there is that skeptic in me that says "bogus"...but on the other hand, would somebody really be that desperate for attention if they're not suing for damages?)

Does look opened ... where is the letter w/ the pics from whoever?

You know, I'm thinking about it..maybe it's Wal-Mart's new "buy some chicken, own a little bit of NASCAR" promotion.

Pieces of metal like this are rare in packaging because most companies have some sort of magnetic tunnel on their production lines to keep this sort of thing from happening. Then again if the metal isn't ferrous, I can see it slipping past inspection.

who buys food at Walmart??

@adamondi: When you say "nut" and you're already talking about food, it's easy to assume that perhaps it's like a peanut or a cashew or a walnut (which isn't outside the range of possibility and not really all that gross) but when you say "hex nut" you immediately think of the kind of nut that goes on a bolt.

Plus, Why the hell would you buy chicken with a nut in it? That kind of thing falls to the bottom of the bag immediately when you pick it up, frozen or not, and it's not that hard to see in the package. Unless the buyer was totally oblivious at the time...

adamondi, people often read this site via rss, clicking on headlines that interest them. I wanted them to know it was something metal, avoid confusion, etc.

.....Magnetic tunnel? That's a good one! Now if they could just make a tunnel for carbon bits...

.....Packaging equipment manufacturers haven't even figured out how to effectively deal with static electricity on plastic-wrap machines, yet!

.....This nut thing, you've either got a customer planting the thing, or employee sabotage, 99.9999999% of the time!

Allergy warning: Packaged in a facility that processes nuts.

lol this reminds me of when Bart found the jagged metal 'O' in his Krusty-O cereal.

Wal-Mart's just trying to divert people's attention from the Nazi t-shirts.

It's more of an oddity than gross, isn't it? I mean, the food is touching all sorts of metal before it gets to the bag anyway. Given a choice b/w this chicken and KFC West Village -- I'm eatin the Walmart Nutin Fillets, and gimme seconds...

Ok someone's gotta say it so I guess it'll be me.

Looks like the chicken is fortified with extra Iron.

Oh dear got put that club down...aaaiiieeeee!

Oh man... it's a good thing I turned vegeterian 7 years ago. What could possibly drive someone to buy a frozen carcass to later, defrost it and eat it. Did I mention the hex nut bolt bonus to heat up alongside the carcass and brand it for decoration?

Wonder why the receipt is on the package in the last photo. Is someone covering up a slit in in the packaging? Just speculating.

It's possible it was stuck to some of the chicken further up inside the package, where it would be covered by the colored label. Then the purchaser wouldn't find it until the package was opened.

Oh you people complaining about your chicken bag prizes. Thats a PRIZE! Don't you know that in every 1,000th bag of Walmart chicken, and Pre-packaged chicken feet, complete with toes, you receive a jagged metal ring as a prize?

Anyone else read the receipt? It looks kinda off... The prices add up to $20.10 and there was no tax added. Buyer paid an even $20? Come on, how often does that happen? Plus the print on the receipt looks like an aborted Photoshop distort/perspective job. I call hoax.

Hmm... Let's see. The frozen boneless skinless chicken is processed on a machine. The machine has lots of moving parts. Sometimes things come loose or break before routine maintenance schedules. These things are bound to happen. It's not like the nut was embedded into a piece of chicken they took a bite of. Take it back, get new chicken, move on.

@thechansen: No tax added because they were all food items. Where I live, there's no tax on food. Probably the same where the chicken was purchased.

When I was a QC Chemist for a frosting company, the lab was attached to the plant, so we would get to see how the day to day operations went. When the items came down the conveyer they would pass through a circular metal detector. This could sense stainless steel, ferrous and non-ferrous metals. The rejection limit was set very low. It would kick off anything that contained any of the above metals larger than a 4mm diameter ball. If they had the same set-up (most food processing plants do) they could have been running with faulty metal detectors or had the metal detectors shut off all together.

What? This is obviously just one of Wal-Mart's new and improved Frankenchickens.

Are they bagging this shit in a machine shop?

A lot of mass produced food actually passes through metal detectors to help make sure this doesn't happen. Personally, I'd rather have a metal nut in my chicken instead of a dead rat, someones finger, or any other number of contaminants.

.....I've seen those metal detector machines. Most are plagued by false alarms. The look good on the line, and you can get rid of production-killing stoppages quite nicely by unpluging the controller cord. Sorry, but that's how it's done. It's a lot cheaper to hand out a free pack of chicken now and then, than to suffer through $200-an-hour downtime on the line!

@75Sasha: Like 75Sasha said, there are metal detectors with very low tolerances on the production lines. We have them at the Factory Bakery where I work. The instant any little bit of metal is detected, *woosh* compressed air blows the loaf of bread/or buns off the line, and down a chute into a tall trash can. These things are inspected, and tested every shift, because not one of these companies wants a multi-million dollar lawsuit against their company.

Seriously can someone address fleef's question - who is buying food at Walmart??? How much cheaper is it than regular supermarkets? Are people that lazy and complacent about buying good food products that they buy everything that they need in one trip? Like it's too much trouble to run errands at Wal-Mart and then go around the corner to the Super Market. Shudder - ick, poo ...

@blythedesign: Many times Walmart is the only game in town. Even here in a major city Walmart is only 1 of I'd say 3 main places the vast majority of people buy their groceries. One of the other two is Target. Almost all the other grocery stores I remember from growing up here have been edged out by these 3.

Based on the look of that nut, I call for an immediate inspection of that particular store's 28,366,542,311 grocery carts!