You never know what you’ll find at Trader Joe’s. But when a Washington, D.C. resident went to her local store for a bag of kale salad, she was in for a shock.
Grace Goldstein took to her Instagram this week to share an unwelcome discovery in her bag of kale salad from Trader Joe’s: a dead lizard.
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“Why is there a lizard in my bag of kale?” Goldstein wrote, following up by saying the vomit emojis “have never been more appropriate.”
Goldstein described her shock in an interview with PEOPLE.
“It was a back and forth between denial and horror, which amounted to a lot of asking my boyfriend to see the bag of kale and identify the lizard and shrieking and pushing it away and refusing to go near it…and then asking to see it again,” she said.
After calming down, she placed the bag in a freezer to preserve the lizard, then contacted the grocery store’s corporate office.
“We had reached out to TJ corporate and weren’t sure if we were also going to bring it back to the local store where we bought it and didn’t want a decomposing lizard in the fridge,” Goldstein said. “It’s a little too close to my late night ice cream for comfort.”
A Trader Joe’s representative told the magazine they are investigating Goldstein’s complaint.
“We are committed to providing customers with great products of the highest quality and are currently working with our vendor to look into and address the matter,” the rep said in a statement.
One of Goldstein’s friends, Kate Berner, posted a picture of the salad bag and asked other Twitter users to share their Trader Joe’s horror stories.
Former Joe Biden spokesperson Kendra Barkoff Lamy was one of the first to respond, revealing she once found a two-foot long strand of hair in one of the store’s ice cream sandwiches.
Omg! We had a hair that was 2 feet long that came out of a #traderjoes ice cream sandwich. pic.twitter.com/JrKvLg5bzt
— Kendra Barkoff Lamy (@kabarkof) April 4, 2018
“[Oh my God]! We had a hair that was 2 feet long that came out of a [Trader Joe’s] ice cream sandwich,” Lamy wrote.
Twitter user Randy Abbonizio joined in with a story of his own, revealing that he found a long strand of hair in one of the store’s brand of burritos.
About 5 year ago in the Arlington VA location (Clarendon) I had a long hair in one of their frozen burritos, never even bothered to take it back, but over the course of the years, this stuff keep coming up I’ve noticed.
— Randy Abbonizio (@anauburntiger) April 7, 2018
“About 5 year ago in the Arlington VA location (Clarendon) I had a long hair in one of their frozen burritos, never even bothered to take it back, but over the course of the years, this stuff keep coming up I’ve noticed,” Abbonizio wrote.
When asked if the experience ruined kale for her, Goldstein told PEOPLE she’s a fan of spinach now.
