Donna Souza couldn’t believe her eyes, at first, as she stared into her salad bowl Tuesday night.
A pair of speckled, cream-colored frog legs were sticking out of the spinach leaves she bought at a Glendora market over the weekend, she says.
“I’m just really disgusted. I don’t think I can ever eat a salad again,” Souza said. “How could they miss a dead frog?”
Souza, of Covina, said she bought the package of spinach from Sam’s Club at 1301 South Lone Hill Ave. According to the label, the baby spinach leaves are grown and packaged by Taylor Farms, a Salinas-based produce company.
The leaves are organic and triple washed.
“So no dirt, but frogs,” Souza joked.
In a letter sent to Souza the next day, Taylor Farms Food Safety and Quality Assurance Director Kari Valdes said the company’s harvesting equipment is designed to prevent “foreign objects” from ending up in their produce.
Valdes explained that in addition to visual inspections by employees, produce passes through a series of vibration tables and through a dual laser sorter that identifies foreign objects and automatically removes them from the product stream.
“On the day this product was processed, this particular line had one laser that was not properly functioning,” Valdes wrote. “It is possible that while the product passed the laser the frog was covered behind a piece of spinach not allowing sight of the laser to the frog.”
It is unclear whether the produce company has received any similar complaints about the baby spinach batch or whether the dead frog contaminated the produce. Taylor Farms management did not respond to requests for comment.
Sam’s Club managers said they have not heard of any other frogs showing up in the packages of spinach. They declined to comment further.
Unless hundreds of frogs are discovered in the produce company’s product or people fall ill, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration will not be investigating the company or issue a recall, said spokesman Jeff Ventura.
“A frog in one salad container probably is not on our radar,” Ventura said, adding that it is not unusual for animals or bugs to show up in food products.
Souza said she was hoping to learn how the frog ended up in the spinach batch, if it had some kind of disease and whether any other spinach could have been contaminated.
“I just worry about other people,” she said. “Thank god I didn’t eat anything because I don’t know if the frog was dead or alive when it went in there.”
