A mum was horrified after finding a live mealworm on a chicken breast she'd ordered from HelloFresh.
Laura Stephen made the stomach-churning discovery after the company delivered the ingredients for three meals to her home on Tuesday July 5, of which she had already tucked into two.
The learning disability nurse spotted the creepy crawly wriggling around on the chicken breast while she was preparing the third and final dish - crispy chicken with chilli and chive sauce. Laura, from Falkirk, said she had enjoyed the first two meals from her order but has sworn off ever using HelloFresh again and has closed her account with the firm.
She told the Daily Record : "It was absolutely disgusting. I was physically feeling really sick.
"I get my HelloFresh meals delivered on a Tuesday and I had ordered from them for four weeks in a row previously. When the meals got delivered they were all boxed up and I brought the delivery straight inside.
"When I was making my meals, I took the chicken out of the fridge in a sealed bag. HelloFresh provide you with meal instructions so I was following the recipe card.
"I was coating the chicken breast in oil and when I flipped it round the creature was poking out of the fold in the meat.
"I thought it was a vein at first, then after I moved it I saw it was a maggot or a mealworm. It just completely put me off.
"I had unfortunately already eaten the other two meals from the box. I was totally sickened.
"I couldn't even go back to look to see if it was alive or if there was any more of them. I didn't hang about to check."
The mum-of-three disposed of the chicken straight away and alerted the international meal-kit service, which supplies its customers with food and recipes, to her discovery on its Twitter account.
HelloFresh emailed Laura to say it takes complaints of this nature "very seriously" and that it had launched an investigation which could last for "up to a month".
The company added that it was too late for Laura to cancel her next order but said she would receive a full refund, including £2.90 to cover the price of the chicken.
Laura, 45, is dissatisfied with the company's handling of her complaint. She said: "When they first contacted me they offered me a £2.90 refund for the chicken and £10 credit on my account. I got back to them and said that was a complete insult. I was actually vomiting.
"Then about 24 hours later they sent another email to say it would take about a month for them to conduct their investigation. I would have liked if someone could have given me a call about it but they said everything had to be dealt with over email.
"I was horrified by what I had seen in my food. Their response just made me really annoyed.
"I cancelled my next order as there's no way I could ever eat anything from them ever again."
A HelloFresh spokesperson told the Daily Record: "We are aware of the complaint and apologised directly to the customer, who received a gesture of goodwill and has been offered a full refund for the box. As requested by the customer, we have also closed her account.
"The safety of our ingredients is our number one priority, and as soon as we learned of this incident, our customer service team acted swiftly and urgently raised this issue with our Food Safety Quality Assurance team and the supplier, we also informed the relevant authority. Given the thorough nature of the investigation with the supplier this will take some time to complete."
