Claim: Photograph shows a pill found in a grape purchased at WalMart.
Example: [Collected via Facebook, October 2013]
Just wanted to let you guys now I'm not happy right now. I bought a pack of the Delano farms table grapes for my family at your store located on
Origins: It is true that in October 2013 an Arizona woman reported to a local WalMart store (and subsequently to the police) that her daughter had supposedly found a large white pill in the middle of a grape purchased from that WalMart store, as stated in the Facebook post reproduced above:
Carla Egelston bought what looked like a regular container of grapes. But when her daughter, Brianna, went to wash them the family was surprised.
"When I looked at it, it was a big white pill,” Egelston said.
Egelston showed us a picture taken October 8 of the white pill, right in the middle of a grape.
She bought the grapes from a Walmart in Peoria and wasn't pleased with their initial response.
"They didn't ask for any of my information, didn't ask for what type of grapes they were," Egelston said.
But after informing the store that she filed a police report with the Peoria Police Department Egelston said, "They wanted to know what type of grapes they were, my phone number, my name, everything."
She posted the pictures to Walmart's official Facebook page, but says she has no ill will toward the store.
"I never said I was going to stop shopping at Walmart. I never said Walmart was at fault," Egelston said.
She just wants to remind parents to always check their food, for the sake of their kids.
"I'm not going to say I'm a perfect shopper and look at everything, but I'm more careful now. I just want to warn parents with little ones that people do this. There are sick people out there," Egleston said.
However, food contamination reports often turn out to be something other than what was originally claimed: in many cases complaining consumers have themselves inserted
foreign material into food they have bought and then falsely claimed the foreign material was present in the food when they purchased it (in order to perpetrate a damages claim against the manufacturer or vendor, or simply to garner publicity); children have placed foreign material into food and then falsely reported to their parents that they found the material in the food; and in some cases someone else (such as a pranking friend or relative) has inserted foreign material into food post-purchase without the consumer's being aware of it. Neither WalMart nor the Peoria police has as yet announced any investigative findings in this case about how the pill might have gotten into the grape, or whether it was really there at the time the grapes were purchased.
Last updated: 14 October 2013
 | Sources: |
Suratos, Pete. "Surprise Family Gets a Surprise in Their Grapes." KNXV-TV [Phoenix]. 13 October 2013.