A Whole Foods customer in Colorado had to call the Health Department after taking a bite out of his fried chicken — and finding out it was raw in the center.
On Jan. 21, Redditor u/diggabytez — aka Paul — posted a now-deleted image in the subreddit /r/mildlyinfuriating of a piece of fried chicken he purchased from a Whole Foods Market in Denver, Colorado.
The photograph, which TODAY.com has obtained, shows a fried chicken breast “from the Whole Foods deli” with a bite taken out of it, revealing it to be raw in the middle.
The post garnered plenty of attention on Reddit, with more than 67,000 upvotes and over 5,000 comments prior to its deletion. And though there were “fowl“ jokes, most people took the incident very seriously.
“Call the store and ask to talk to the prepared food team leader and tell them about it,” one Reddit user commented. “Someone in the kitchen is f—— up and I bet they would want to know.”
“As someone who works in a kitchen, PLEASE for the love of God tell them,” someone else agreed. “Much better they know before someone gets seriously sick.”
“This could get someone killed,” wrote another person. “You have to take this to management and raise a stink.”
The Reddit user, who prefers to use the pseudonym “Paul” to maintain his anonymity, says he purchased the chicken on Jan. 20 and ate it the next day, on Jan. 21. He notes that he did, in fact, “raise a stink,” as many commenters implored him to do.
“This was my go to Whole Foods in my old neighborhood,” Paul tells TODAY.com in an email, adding that he was surprised to see fried chicken sold in the winter, but went for it anyway, intending for it to be a quick, pre-gym snack.
“I ate a drumstick and noticed it seemed to have what seemed to be a lot of sinew,” he says. “I then took a big bite of the cold breast and saw the discoloration. I looked closer and saw it was completely raw inside. Unfortunately it was too late to spit it out.”
Paul says his wife immediately called the Whole Foods, and the employee they spoke to told them to bring back the chicken if they wanted a refund.
“Her response was, ‘We would just like you to know so no one else gets sick and you can do better,’” Paul says. “Their response was ‘ok ok’ basically wanting off the phone. No sense of empathy, no apology.”
Paul says, thankfully, he never got sick and credits his “iron stomach” for not suffering from food poisoning, as raw chicken can can be contaminated with bacteria like Campylobacter, Salmonella or Clostridium perfringens. But he felt the need to let the local Health Department know what happened.
The Denver Department of Public Health & Environment tells TODAY.com that it received his complaint and determined it was founded when it followed up with the Whole Foods location.
“When the investigator reached out to Whole Foods, management was aware of the complaint and had already removed all the fried chicken of this type from the shelves,” the health official tells TODAY.com in an email.
The official says management pulled video records and found that a Whole Foods employee missed a step in cooking the chicken that resulted in it being golden brown on the exterior but undercooked in the middle.
“Per proper food handling regulations, the employee was supposed to finish cooking the chicken in the oven and verify an internal temperature of 165 degrees after first deep frying it from frozen,” the official notes. “From a public health perspective, cooking and verifying cooking temperature is critical, and it’s important that all food retailers follow these procedures to keep folks safe.”
“We take food safety extremely seriously,” a Whole Foods representative tells TODAY.com in an email. “As soon as we were alerted to the issue, we immediately removed the product from the sales floor and began an investigation.”
The representative encourages any customers who may have purchased this item from the packaged and refrigerated section of prepared foods at the specific location — the Washington Park store at 1111 S. Washington St. in Denver — to contact its customer service team at 1-844-WFM-TALK.
Whole Foods says only one unit of the affected product was sold to a customer, it was limited to the refrigerated and packaged to-go section (not the hot bar), and that the remainder of the batch was removed from sale.
The grocery chain says store leadership is working directly with its food safety team to identify the cause, enhance its temperature monitoring protocols and retrain food service team members.
But Paul isn’t the only one — even just on Reddit — who found his Whole Foods fried chicken to be raw in the center. On Aug. 17, another customer on the other side of the country posted to the r/boston subreddit warning others about the undercooked fried chicken they purchased.
“Warning!!!” u/sirlucien wrote in the post, indicating through photos that the chicken was purchased at the Beacon Street Whole Foods in Somerville, Massachusetts.
The Reddit user followed up to say they informed the location and got a refund, but that they “won’t be getting that again.”
