A mother in the UK made a shocking discovery after bringing her children food from a local McDonald’s. Laura Arber, 32, had just sat down to eat with her family on Tuesday, August 4 when her daughter, Maddie, began choking on her chicken McNuggets. After physically clearing her daughter’s airway, Arber found something truly bizarre: face mask material embedded in the McNuggets.
“My little daughter just started choking and I put my fingers down her throat to loop it out — there was just blue with the sick,” Arber said, according to Hampshire Live.
Examining the rest of her daughter’s McNuggets, Arber found something truly unexpected.
“It was a mask, it was absolutely baked into it, it had gone like chewing gum,” she told the BBC.
Understandably upset, Arber thought of how much worse things could have gone if she hadn’t been there.
“What if I had walked out of the room and my daughter had choked?” she said. “She could have died. It’s a split second thing.”
Immediately, Arber called the restaurant to speak to the branch manager before going back to the store in person. There, the manager told her that the nuggets were cooked off-site, but did not offer an apology or stop serving the nuggets.
“Before I left I said ‘Are you going to keep serving them?’ And they were carrying on serving them, and that was the big thing for me.”
Since the incident, McDonald’s has reached out to Arber to offer a full refund and ask her to return the defective nuggets “so we [can] further investigate the matter and isolate the affected product.”
“As soon as we were made aware of the issue we opened a full investigation with the relevant supplier, and have taken action to ensure any product from this batch is removed from restaurants,” a McDonald’s spokesperson said. “We would like to offer a full apology to the customer in questions and understand they are currently in conversation with our customer services team.”