Update: Dancing Deer apologized.
Helen writes: “I had some friends over for dinner last night, and didn’t feel like making dessert from scratch so I bought a package of Dancing Deer brand blondies (they’re advertised as organic, all-natural, etc. etc.) to serve instead. So after dinner I opened the package, took out the top three blondie bars, cut them in half to be a bit more normal-sized, and set them out on a plate. Everyone loved theirs, but when I bit into mine — it bit back. I pulled it out of my mouth to find a two-inch-long. quarter-inch cylinder of metal baked right into the damn thing.”
Of course I documented it with a digital camera and a ruler, and I kept all the packaging, the uneaten blondies, and the piece of metal itself. Today I called Dancing Deer and spoke to their Quality Assurance person, Anne Zielinski, who — while very nice — at no point apologized (I guess this is a legal thing?), though she took down my personal information and said she would be sending me a mailing kit so I could return to them the metal, the packaging, and the remaining product.
A couple of my less scrupulous friends are urging me to sue Dancing Deer for whatever they’ve got, but that’s probably not going to happen: I like their products, I wasn’t hurt, and I don’t want to lie and say I was. At the same time, Dancing Deer hasn’t offered me *anything* – an apology, money, products, coupons, even a refund – and I’m not sure what I deserve here. What’s the protocol for this? What happens next?
We wouldn’t sue, but terrible customer service can lead otherwise reasonable customers to litigate. Let’s not forget that the woman who sued McDonald’s after spilling scalding hot coffee on herself only went to court because Ronald refused to apologize or take responsibility for the accident.
Two weeks after speaking with quality assurance staffer Zielinski, Helen has yet to receive the promised return kit or an apology, and two messages left with Dancing Deer have gone unreturned. The blondie-encrusted cylinder is sitting idly in a sealed container. Tell us, dear Consumerists, what, beyond an apology and a few freebies, should Helen reasonably expect?
Update: Helen reports a happy ending: “Actually, I spoke to Anne Zielinski again yesterday (finally got through!) and she was very apologetic about them, in her words, “dropping the ball.” She said she would send over the UPS kit right away, along with lots of cookies. I’m feeling much better about everything 
“
More From Consumerist
-
How Is The iPad Mini Different From Its Big Brother?
-
Mother Probably Less Concerned With Size Of Subway Sandwich Than The Glass Shards In It
-
Amazon Marketplace Dispute Leaves Me With No Money, No Navigation System
-
Parts Of A Broken Air Canada Jet Engine Rain Down Toronto Suburb
-
Everything This Appliance Delivery Service Could Screw Up, They Did
that was just an “organic” toothpick
i think finding a sharp metal object in your food is grounds to sue. this company is in it to make a profit, and shouldn’t put consumers at risk for their bottom line. if they are too busy or mechanized or whatever to prevent sharp metal objects from being in their food, they are being neglegent. sure it happens to you, but how do you know this isn’t a more wide spread thing. if this happened to a dozen consumers, bet everybody would be on board to sue then.
Hi! I am the Helen of the giant piece of metal.
Between sending in my story and the time this post went up, I got on track to what I think was a great resolution. I just emailed Carey the following:
I spoke to Anne Zielinski again yesterday (finally got through!) and she was very apologetic about them, in her words, “dropping the ball.” She said she would send over the UPS kit right away, along with lots of cookies. I’m feeling much better about everything
Dancing Deer Baking Co is a wonderful, generous company — gives a lot to the community including establiching itself in an improverished zone and donating lots of time and funds to area charities. Cut them some slack friends
I used to work at a cookie company at the mall in high school. We got the dough shipped to us frozen from corporate headquarters in giant boxes – then we’d scoop the dough with ice cream scoopers and bake the cookies fresh in the store.
One time we were about half-way through a box and there was a clang as the baker was scooping out dough. He dug around a little bit and voila! There was a six inch long rusty metal screwdriver in the dough! All I could think of is some factory repairman hanging high over the giant cookie dough mix, dropping his screwdriver in – shrugging and getting another screwdriver out.
We stopped using the box, called corporate – they basically said, “Oh well” – we rinsed off the screwdriver and hung it in the back.
This was 1984 – way before all the crazy lawsuits.
unreal.
this organic stuff is getting scarey…does “organic” also mean “unregulated”? im getting to get the impression that this organic stuff is like a more expensive black market system of food.
Their are some perfectly fine organic products, but this is REALLY frightening. Someone could have gotten some significant damage (more so than eating too many trans fats…which is something you do to yourself)
Thank God this wasn’t eaten by a child.
@Hossofcourse: How’s about your generous company answering the OPs issues, and doing what they said they’d do, then we’ll cut them some slack, eh?
Oh for heaven’s sake — it’s a bit that fell off a machine in the factory. No, bits absolutely should not fall off that machinery into your food; I don’t think any food-making company agrees that they SHOULD. That can not change the fact that sometimes they DO, for unexpected reasons. So the company wants the bit back is so they can go into their factory, find what machine it came off of, and fix whatever problem caused it to break and figure out how to prevent it in the future.
The fact that it has taken them two weeks to get on top of the problem is far more worrisome than a metal piece falling in the food in the first place. That indicates there is terrible (if any) communication between customer service and internal quality control / factory maintenance, which is a bad situation; it’s even worse in high-risk manufacturing like food processing. Somebody high in the ranks of Dancing Deer should look into THAT problem. I’ve worked as a manufacturing engineer for seven years and I would be furious if somebody neglected to tell me that one of my factory’s machines was broken enough to violate FDA regulations — but I’m weird, I take pride in my work.
Foreign objects got into food on rare occasions. Shit happens. (Read “The Jungle” and be glad it’s more rare than it used to be.) But when the food maker doesn’t jump on the problem and fix it, that’s clearly saying they don’t care, and that’s a big red flag to me to never buy their products. Even delicious products like these which I used to like.
The biggest issue is how did metal end up in the blondie. If the company is not going to actively try to find this out to stop it from happening again it makes all of their product potentially dangerous. I am more worried about their lack of concern that they may be putting more people at risk and not caring. At this point I would not buy anything of theirs because it looks like they are not too worried about potential danger to a consumer.
As for the lawsuit angle. Luckily nobody was hurt but the potential for some serious physical damage was there. A company should be more concerned about the potential major hospitalization of a consumer of their product.
Sure things happen and machines can cause things like this. But if they apparently don’t care that they may have machinery spitting out metal into their product it degrades the product.
This isn’t nabisco or generic cookies from Walmart. This is supposedly a higher end organic brand, one would expect better.
But are they taking this seriously?
@PSN: kingpsyz: NO! they are taking it VERY SERIOUS! you can’t forget to add the “very”. it makes all the difference in weather they are being “sincere”.
oh well in that case nothing to see here, move along people.
A customer at a coffee shop I work at once bit into a muffin and pulled a penny out of her mouth. She didn’t freak out about it. Things happen. Especially with mass produced food. Just imagine all the bits and pieces of foreign objects you don’t catch and ingest. If people are really so panicked about the odd objects they find in their food, the best thing to do is to prepare it yourself.
penny VS. 2″ metal shank
METAL SHANK WINS!
I read once that doctors who apologize to patients when they know they’ve made mistakes are less likely to be sued than doctors who don’t in similar situations. It’s apparently because people want an honest resolution more than they want to sue over minor issues.
This customer shouldn’t have to sue, but at this point they are being ignored and what else will get this company’s attention and get them to make it right for the customer and assure that this doesn’t happen again?
@PSN: kingpsyz: OMG!! Call the authorities!
Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t it a health code/law to require a metal detector at the end of your cooking process, before the items are boxed up?
I’ve been to a few food factory tours (Mission, Hershey’s, Boudin, See’s, General Mills) and they all had metal detectors scanning the product as it went off to packaging, just in case any bits of machinery got loose. Some of the tour guides even mentioned that they’re super sensitive, being able to detect specks even smaller than 1cm. Don’t know if that’s true, but the general concept of checking your food for metal is sound.
OK, I’ll go into more detail…
If you get a penny in your muffin you might be miffed (or would that be muffed?), but you know what a penny is and it’s a “self contained unit” as it were. Unless it was a piece of a penny.
The logic being while it sucks it was in your food it’s inoccuous and there’s nothing else to worry about. But with a metal shank, you’ll assume it broke off of something so how many pieces fell in, what else fell in, are there small metal flakes that will shred my colon tonight? ect.
So yes, Metal Shank still has Victoly.
@helen: Glad you got it all sorted out, and now they’re sending you free metal-less blondies.
My family owns a cookie factory in the Caribbean. The absolute last step in the manufacturing/packaging process is a trip through a magnetometer (metal detector). This is because machines naturally get worn down and small pieces get into the product. I believe if the magnetometer picks up anything, the entire batch is thrown out, the line is stopped, and all of the machines are checked for broken parts.
I’m really surprised that the FDA doesn’t require food manufacturers to have magnetometers. I bet you a nice fat law suit will make Dancing Deer install one though!
I had some of these brownies about a month ago. They are VERY VERY expensive. If they were cheap-o I could understand – but from a premium company you have to expect premium customer service.
@iransofaraway: Ehhhh, I would think it is more a “best practice” of the industry, rather than a regulation. The implementation of sensors like this (and yes, they can be that sensitive) is pretty cheap and easy. A regulation would be more like “don’t have metal bits in your food”, leaving it up to individual businesses to decide how they will implement it, than “put inductance sensors on the conveyor belt”. So if somebody wanted to put an X-Ray machine on the line instead of inductance sensors, or magnetometers, they could.
Which could be what you meant, in which case never mind
And it’s possible that Dancing Deer has one but it broke. Sensors fail as much as machines drop metal bits, probably even more often. It’s up to DD to follow up on exactly what part(s) of their production line failed to allow the contaminated product out the door.
It’s a prison shank!
suing them would have been ridiculous. the person wasn’t injured. as long as the company replaced the brownie and compensated with one more, she has been taken care of. if she was hurt, one would expect the company to pay for her medical bills and a bit for pain and suffering. we really need to be intelligent about mistakes. a company is not perfect. if we keep suing companies, we’re going to have economic issues worse than we have today because companies are not going to be able to thrive in our own country. already our doctors are having issues because of frivolous malpractice lawsuits. do we want to continue with companies that make a mistake that didn’t hurt anyone? if she was hurt, had to go to the doctors, brought it up to the attention of the company, and they ignored her and did nothing about it, they should be sued. in this case because she wasn’t injured and they compensated her, nothing more need be done.