A woman was left “shaking with fury” after she bit into what she believes was a shard of glass in her Cornetto ice cream which she was sharing with her baby.
%image(15197374, type="article-full", alt="Wall's has sent a �3 voucher as a "gesture of good will."")
Wall’s took in the hard foreign object for testing, but they have not confirmed what it was. They claim it is unlikely it is glass as their factory is glass-free.
The mother, a member of the Hampstead Mums Facebook group, said she was told verbally over the phone by a Wall’s customer service representative that laboratory tests revealed it was glass.
The customer, who does not want to be named, had been sharing the ice cream with her baby on June 17, having bought it from a Willesden corner shop, near where she lives.
She said: “I bit into the chocolate-dipped cone part and the part I bit off felt really weird in my mouth so I spat it out.
“It looked and felt like a piece of brown glass, around a centimetre in size, that was an exact colour match to the chocolate.”
She believes that her 11-month-old baby could have cut herself or suffered some “awful internal damage from the glass”.
She was asked to send in the object for testing.
But the testing process was originally delayed as Wall’s initially did not send the evidence collection kit for weeks.
It then said it could not investigate without the batch number, which had been lost when the ice cream was ripped open.
Walls have since sent her a £3 voucher as a “goodwill gesture”.
The mother said: “That felt pretty insulting as it indicated that Wall’s considered the incident inconsequential.”
A spokeswoman for Unilever, who own Wall’s, said: “Safety is always our top priority and we take complaints such as this very seriously. We are investigating our customer’s experience further, though this is made more difficult due to the lack of batch code information. We will be in touch with her again soon.
“In the meantime, we would like to offer reassurances that we have stringent quality checks in place in our ice cream factories, including a policy that they are strictly glass-free.”
The spokeswoman added that while Wall’s has suggested that the object might be a “hardened or overcooked piece of cone”, it has been unable to establish the material or its origin in its tests.
The mother intends to contact the Food Standards Agency.
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