I really don’t like it much when I go to a manager of a grocery store and explain that they are selling a product that has the potential to be contaminated, and they don’t pay attention. Kroger would be such a store. It has been easily a year since I first mentioned to them that their packaging on some frozen fruits (my experience has been with Private Selection) in that it has the potential to allow bacteria and other non-food things to get inside the packaging.  I first noticed the packaging issue with their dark cherries (frozen) and when my freezer went through its defrost cycle, the liquid inside the packaging leaked out of the package and onto the bottom of my freezer.  This in and of itself is not the issue, though I did have to clean up a mess.  The greater issue is “if something can leak out” of packaging, then “something can get in”…. that makes sense to me, am I the only one that it makes sense to?  So I called their customer service hotline, and explained the “potential hazard” and expected a response.  But none came.

I made several other calls to them with different packages of frozen fruit, the calls in the middle of the summer were about frozen blackberries.  So this last time I got a package (this time a small package) of frozen blackberries I noticed that they had not heeded the information sent, and that they are still packaging their food with a potential for contamination.  Below you will see the perforations in the packaging at the top, presumably to make it easy to tear open (which I doesn’t anyway) and those perforations are relatively large holes, big enough for insects, big enough for fluids from other sources to seep in.  Why is a company so deaf to potential litigation on product contamination?  The reason I would propose is that they think they are too big to fail.  A common theme in todays world (which unfortunately even spilled over into politics this presidential election year) .  Call your Kroger company and complain if you eat these frozen products, you might save yourself, or someone else from food-borne illness.

THe white dots on the lower picture is “light” coming in through the holes in the packaging. The package’s zip loc closure is NOT sealed when the product is produced thus all during production, shipping, storage and to your home, it is open for contamination.