By Cara Sulieman
A HUNGRY Scot got a crunchy surprise in a bag of salad she bought from her local shop – when she found a creepy crawly on her plate.
Helen Dixon, 27, found a live cockroach after she tipped out the Italian-style salad from budget supermarket chain Lidl.
Having already munched on the first half of the bag of lettuce the night before, she felt sick when she made the gruesome discovery.
But she has kept the bug as proof of what happened, putting him in a glass jar and naming him Colin.
“Disgusting”
The business development executive had bought the salad from the Lidl on Dalry Road and was tucking into it in her Polwarth home in Edinburgh on Sunday.
Helen said: “It was quite disgusting. On Saturday I had some of the salad and put in back in the fridge and on Sunday I put some more on to the plate and it popped out.
“There’s no way he could have got into it overnight, because the top of the bag had a clip around it. I felt like vomiting, it was disgusting.
“I thought it was a beetle, but I’ve got it at work and everyone thinks it’s a cockroach.
“Because it was alive in the bag, I thought that was worse than it being dead, so I wanted to show it to Lidl.”
“Traumatised”
But Colin’s adventure seems to have taken a toll on his health and it’s touch and go if he’ll survive long enough to be taken back to the store.
Helen said: “I put him in a jar, but he looks like he’s going to die.
“I just chucked some of the salad in and one of the girls at work gave him a raisin and he enjoyed that, but I think he’s shrinking a bit. He is just about as traumatised as me.
“I phoned Lidl and they said ‘can you try and bring it in?’ so I have to go back and hand him in to them.”
“Investigate”
A spokesman for Lidl said that their supplier had assured them there were very stringent cleaning and inspecting methods in place.
He added: “Our policy is to fully investigate the issue. The customer is fully refunded and supplied with a replacement product. Each instance would be dealt with on an individual basis.
“Our quality assurance team carry out routine tests on all our products and on no occasion has this product raised any quality issues.”
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