On shrimp tails in Cinnamon Toast Crunch
God, it’s such a delight when the news cycle is blessed with Food Safety News. Nothing gets me out of bed faster.
Today we’re going to break down the Cinnamon Toast Crunch Shrimp Mystery in exhaustive detail. By doing so, we will reach a strong hypothesis about what happened and whether you need to worry about sugar-frosted shramps in your morning bowl.
What we know: A comedian named Jensen Karp found several foreign objects (that’s an industry term) in his box of cereal. At first, It appeared to be 2 shrimp tails. Jenson reached out to Cinnamon Toast Crunch and they told him not to worry; it was just clumps of sugar. Karp kept looking in his bag o’ cereal and discovered several other items that struck him as peculiar.
But there’s more: Karp’s family-sized box contained two bags of cereal. On the other (unopened box), he noticed that the bottom of the bag had been re-sealed with clear tape and that it contained something stringy (he called it “floss”) along with a second knotty length of string.
Now, to a Pro™ like me, this appears at first to be nothing new. Foreign object contamination is common in industrial food processing. Two years ago I found a piece of ceramic tile in my Breyer’s ice cream. Did I eat the ice cream anyway? Yes. It was Vanilla, my favorite flavor. I’m not a prude.
But if at first glance the Karp case seems unremarkable, a second look surfaces some...let’s say, irregularities. In order of suspiciousness:
The foreign objects found in the cereal appear totally unrelated and don’t point towards a specific failure in the manufacturing process. (For example, the ceramic shard in my tub of Breyer’s was probably an aging piece of wall tile that got power washed straight into a mixer.) But what’s the commonality between shrimp tails, string, and different string? Beats me. None of these things has any place on a manufacturing floor.
The re-taped bag strongly points to tampering after the product left the factory.
The bag of shrimp-containing cereal appears to have not been tampered with. If this is true, then the foreign objects were introduced to the cereal bag before it was sealed on the factory floor.
So what the hell happened?
I’m going to lay out seven scenarios. Pick which one you believe is correct. I’ll reveal the answer below.
Scenario #1 A General Mills employee stuffs some shrimp tails into his coat pocket after a seafood lunch, as a souvenir. Back on the cereal boxing line, he leans over a tumbler full of cereal and his coat pocket spills shrimp tails plus random string / lint into the mixture. Little bitta string, little bitta shrimp, straight into the cereal tumbler. Oops!
Likelihood: Low. Employees on the manufacturing line don’t wear the same clothes on the plant floor as they do on their lunch breaks. Rather, they have dedicated gowns worn only on the factory floor which are designed specifically without breast pockets so that there’s no possibility anything could fall into the food. The recurring problem of “random shit ending up in the food” means that employees only use retractable pens (pen caps are a liability) and papers are always loose, since staples also inevitably end up in the food. What if you cut your hand on the job? You’ll be given a blue bandaid (easiest color to spot) which also contains traces of metal so it will show up on the metal detectors that scan outgoing shipments. Genius!
Scenario #2: The foreign objects originated in the ingredients sourced by GM which were used to make Cinnamon Toast Crunch. This happened in a similar case in which a 1.24 million pound shipment of blueberries became contaminated with shrimp
Likelihood: Low-Medium The possibility of ingredient contamination is high, especially when the ingredients are raw agricultural products (e.g. cinnamon) that pass through poorly managed warehouses with sub-par food safety conditions. But if this were the case, you’d expect the contamination to be spread throughout the whole batch of CTC, not just two bags, right? The, uh, extremely local nature of this quality defect — just two bags— suggests that the problem either occurred downstream or is much more widespread than we currently realize. If 500 MORE shrimp-contaminated bags of General Mills cereal are revealed then this would suggest the problem occurred further upstream (e.g during manufacturing or at an ingredient supplier’s facility) .
“Leave me out of this”
Scenario #3 Someone tampered with the boxes of cereal after they left the GM plant. Much like in the famed Chicago Tylenol Murders, someone along the supply chain opened the packaging and inserted foreign objects into the bag for nefarious purposes and then resealed them.
Likelihood: Medium. The re-taped bag is a compelling clue. My hunch is that post-factory tampering played a role in this snafu, because there is zero possibility that an opened bag of cereal would be retaped and approved for shipment in a General Mills plant. Maybe some guy wandered into the supermarket cereal aisle with filthy pockets and a very specific vision.
Scenario #4 The product was damaged along the supply chain and the damage was covered up.
Likelihood: Low. Picture this: a dopey forklift driver in a Long Island warehouse plows a pallet of cereal into a concrete pylon. Cinnamon Toast Crunch everywhere. Many boxes are damaged beyond salvage but some of the boxes can be patched up with a little tape and — bada-bing, they’re good to sell! While this scenario doesn’t explain the shrimp or the bits of string, you’ve never been in a Long Island food distribution hub, have you? Here’s my point: The products may have been tampered with but the tampering may have been a sloppy—not nefarious— effort at cleaning up an honest mistake made in frighteningly unhygienic conditions.
However, there’s still a gap in this scenario: Both of the bags are contaminated with foreign objects but only bag #2 shows signs of tempering. Either we’re overlooking some subtle tampering with bag #1, or the shrimp was already in the bag when it was sealed... in which case this thing goes all the way to the top (the GM manufacturing line).
“OMW to contaminate your breakfast squares”
Scenario #5 This is the outcome of poor manufacturing design or execution at GM’s processing plant.
Likelihood: Very Low There’s no world in which General Mills processes shrimp on the same equipment they use to make their cereal. Even if they made Cinnamon Toast Shrimp, it would be produced on unique equipment and in a separate building. Food manufacturers like GM are audited by firms whose sole purpose is to structurally eliminate food safety risk. If GM had shrimp anywhere near their cereal production line this would have triggered a failed audit before the cereal was ever on shelves.
Aside from passing their biannual food safety audits, GM has a strong financial incentive to avoid poisoning their customers with undeclared allergens (e.g. shrimp). This has to do with the specific nature of how food allergens, as opposed to bacteria, make people sick.
Here’s what I mean: When a company sells a product with an undisclosed allergen (e.g. shellfish, nuts, milk) they are legally required to disclose what allergens are in that product. When they fail to make these disclosures, the mistake is exposed very quickly. This is because every person who has a food allergy and who eats that product will get sick. Or die. People with food allergies know this and they don’t take chances. But the relationship between consuming harmful bacteria and any subsequent illness is less clear.
For example, if ten people consumed pancake batter laden with salmonella, the results would be inconsistent. Some people might get sick and some people would not get sick at all. Among those who did get sick some might not feel symptoms for two days while others might not feel anything for a week. In other words, it wouldn’t be obvious that there was a common source of the illness experienced by the group, much less what source was. But when it comes to eating food allergens, the symptoms typically onset in minutes, making it easy to pinpoint the culprit containing the allergen.
What this all means is that food manufacturers are rightly terrified of having undisclosed allergens in their products because it can be so easily traced to the company. When there’s shrimp in your cereal it’s hard to blame anything except corporate negligence. The potential for ruinous lawsuits related to undisclosed allergens could bankrupt even General Mills.
So back to the shrimpy cereal: The takeaway here is that if this problem originated at GM, it wasn’t because there is a flaw in the design of their manufacturing line or that some shift worker added shrimp instead of cinnamon. These risks have been structurally eliminated long ago.
Scenario #6 It’s a hoax. Ugh, I’m not gonna even go into this.
Likelihood: The guy who found the shrimpy cereal is a “podcast host and comedy writer,” so you do the math.
Scenario #7 These things are not shrimp tails.
Likelihood: They look like shrimp tails to me, but I also saw the dress as white and gold, so my eyes shan’t be trusted. Still, it doesn’t explain the string.
My Hypothesis:
This was knowingly caused by a single individual for god knows what reason. Something along the lines of Scenarios #3 and #4. This spectacle isn’t about the failure of industrial food, it is more likely about a man who has trouble communicating his feelings.
Runner up hypothesis
Something along the lines of Scenario #2 — these little morsels of non-cereal arrived in one of the ingredients used to make Cinnamon Toast Crunch. As frightening as it is to imagine literal trash rolling across the cereal conveyer belts unnoticed, it’s totally possible. General Mills wouldn’t hate this theory because it would allow them to blame someone else — their cinnamon supplier who they can publicly sever ties with. But if this is the case you can bet we’ll see a whole lotta cereal being recalled off the shelves.
+++++