Toothy surprise in peanuts

Photo: Nicholas Johansen

A Kelowna girl had an unpleasant surprise while trying to enjoy a salty snack last week.

Lauren Mcgee, 12, was eating some peanuts after her lunch on Monday. As she was munching, she felt something odd-shaped in her mouth. Thinking it was some kind of deformed nut, she spat it out.

What she found grossed her out.

“I bit down on something hard, and I pulled it out and I saw a tooth. All the roots were there and stuff,” Lauren said. “It was pretty disgusting.”

Lauren’s father, Sean Mcgee, said he got home and his daughter asked him, “Want to see something gross?”

She said the tooth was fully seasoned and appeared to have been in the jar of name-brand dry-roasted peanuts for some time.

“I’m not sure what happened,” said Esther Serota, customer service specialist at Johnvince Foods, owner of the Canadian Planters brand. “This is not something that has occurred before.”

Mcgee said he bought the peanuts at the No-Frills grocery store in Salmon Arm.

The tooth doesn’t appear to be a human tooth, but Mcgee said he doesn’t know what kind of animal it might have come from.

“I just want to know where the rest of the animal is – in other jars, or what?” Lauren said.

Serota said Johnvince Foods has many levels of quality control to ensure no foreign objects end up in its product.

“It’ll go through a machine that is programmed to identify the proper product’s colour, shape and size, so anything that doesn’t match that … it would have picked it up and sorted it out,” Serota said. “There’s human visual inspections, we have X-rays machines and there’s metal detectors as well.”

It would appear the tooth made it through all the security and into the little girl’s mouth.

The Mcgee family has not contacted Planters or Johnvince and has no plans to pursue legal recourse.

While Lauren said she hasn't eaten any more nuts out of the jar, she hasn't sworn off peanuts for good.