Tuesday 18 December 2012

"there's a legal issue with your ice cream"

Yesterday, while doing a routine grocery shop, I decided to be a bit organised, and buy some Christmas food in advance of the usual last minute mad dash.

Ice cream.  Yum.  Let's see what they've got.  Oooh, these look like a nice treat:
  • Belgian Chocolate Salted Caramel and Hazelnut Ice Cream
  • Belgian Chocolate Orange Blossom Honey and Almond
Not only did they look good, but they were on special offer, encouraging me to get two.  After all, Belgian chocolate.

So, we get to the checkout.  The Belgian Chocolate Salted Caramel and Hazelnut Ice Cream gets scanned, and then the assistant says "I'm sorry, there's a legal issue with your ice cream".  What?  She continues, "it's been recalled".  She put it to one side, then scanned the Belgian Chocolate Orange Blossom Honey and Almond.  "Sorry, that's also been recalled".  Oh.

Well, that's saved me a few pounds -- they are still in my purse, rather than going on my waistline!
A quick Google, and I discover that:
Tesco is taking the precautionary measure of recalling the above code of Tesco Finest Belgian Chocolate Salted Caramel & Hazelnut Ice Cream due a small number of tubs being incorrectly filled with the Orange Blossom Honey & Almond variant (the nut allergy warning is therefore incorrect).   
For identification, the incorrectly filled tubs have the Orange Blossom Honey and Almond lid/top.
Okay.  Several things of interest here:
  1. Why were the items not removed from the shelves?
  2. If the items can be identified from the incorrect tub/correct top combination, why weren't these removed and the others allowed through?
  3. Why was the Orange Blossom Honey and Almond tub also removed, since it had the correct almond warning?
  4. I didn't know nut allergies are specific to the kind of nut -- that someone allergic to almonds could nevertheless eat hazelnuts.  (Well, technically, I still don't actually know if that's the case.)
So tonight, I tried to buy the ice cream again, assuming they would have cleared the shelves and replaced with new goods.  I checked: the tub had a matching hazelnut lid, so was not part of the bad batch.  But the same thing happened at the checkout.  No Belgian Chocolate ice cream for me this Christmas.

1 comment:

  1. I have a couple of the almond and honey ones in my freezer they were on special offer in a Nestle run company shop whether they took the whole batch i can't say and as yet noy tried it either ?

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