Queensland mum Angela Stevenson was cutting up strawberries for her one-year-old daughter when she made a horrifying discovery.
She’d found a sewing needle inside the fruit. Scarily, she would usually hand a whole strawberry to her little girl to eat.
To make matters worse, Angela had also sent her nine-year-old son off to school with strawberries in his packed lunch.
“I rang the school to say, ‘Can you stop him from eating his strawberries? Because we found a needle in one of them’,” she told 7 News.
“They rang me back, not even five minutes later, and said, ‘we were a bit late’.
“He’d already eaten at his fruit break and took a bite out of one of the strawberries.
“He didn’t get hurt or anything – didn’t get pricked. He obviously bit into it, felt it, pulled it out and told the teacher ‘there was a needle in my fruit’ and everyone was sort of gobsmacked as to why? How did it get there?”
At least four contaminated strawberry punnets sold from Woolworths have been found containing sewing needles sparking a recall of Berrylicious and Berry Obsession strawberries in NSW, Queensland and Victoria.
Angela has reported the incident to the police and the Woolworths store where she bought the contaminated punnet from.
The mum wondered whether someone had put the needles in the fruit “deliberately to hurt somebody”.
“What kind of person does that?” Angela said.
“It’s really awful to think somebody out there could do something like that.
“There’s no need for it. You’re going to be hurting potentially innocent children in my house and I hope they catch them and they get in big trouble for it.”
It’s not known who’s responsible for putting the needles in the strawberries but according to Yahoo7 the Queensland Strawberry Growers Association says early indications are that a disgruntled farm worker may be responsible.