Food Lover's in the dog box after 'pieces of plastic' found in pet mince

Abongile Nzelenzele interviews Wendy Knowler, Consumer Journalist.

Listen below (skip to 26:01).

Marietta contacted Wendy Knowler to share her unpleasant experience with a batch of pet mince purchased from Food Lover's Market in West Coast Mall.

She recounted finding "pieces of plastic" while cooking the mince.

Despite removing most of the larger pieces and reporting the issue to the butchery manager, she received dismissive responses.

“My question to the manager was how is the quality control in the butchery as this can happen in the normal mince, hamburger patty and wors. His answer was “Do not buy it then”."

After taking the matter up with Mirella Gastaldi, the Food Lover's Group Managing Executive for Legal, Knowler was told that their National Head of Butchery has advised that certain of their stores produce pets mince from off cuts of the different carcasses that are processed in their stores.

However, Gastaldi emphasised that the presence of plastic was unintentional and likely resulted from a packaging mishap.

"While it is difficult to pin point the exact source of the plastic, it is possible a piece of plastic cling wrap ended up in the lug containing the mix off cuts that was used to produced the pets mince. The plastic was certainly not purposefully added to the mince and appears to have inadvertently ended up in the mince mixture," she said.

Gastaldi has assured that steps are being taken to prevent such incidents in the future, including reinforcing proper procedures in their butchery teams.

As a gesture of apology, Marietta will be receiving a voucher for the inconvenience caused.

"We're all so worried about the plastic with the turtles and the other bits of sea life and we want to give plastic to our domestic pets."

- Wendy Knowler

Scroll up to the audio player to listen to the interview.