What this man found floating in his grandson's Dr. Pepper bottle will make your skin crawl
A man from Katy, Texas, took to Facebook on Monday to express his disgust after he noticed an unwelcome and potentially harmful surprise lurking at the bottom of his young grandson's bottle of Dr. Pepper: A beady-eyed dead rat, "about 3 inches long with a big tail."
John Graves said his 3-year-old grandson, Kayden, drank half the bottle before realizing the creature was inside.
"Nothing like your grandson drinking half a Dr. Pepper only to find a dead rat floating on the bottle," Graves said in his now-viral post.
Since being uploaded, the skin-crawling photos have garnered over 22,000 shares and many comments from people equally disgusted by the incident.
As worried guardians tend to do, Kayden's family immediately called their pediatrician and took him in for testing.
"You think it's rabies. You think of dirty, filthy rodents. What did he ingest?" Graves told KPRC. "They did blood and urine samples, contacted the state of Texas and the CDC."
Graves says in his Facebook post that he contacted Dr. Pepper, and that their response was, "send us the bottle and we will let you know something in 6-8 weeks!"
However, Dr. Pepper-Snapple released a statement to KPRC that said:
Nothing is more important to us than the safety and well-being of our consumers. We take all consumer complaints very seriously, are very concerned about the call we received today from Mr. Graves and are investigating it as best as we can.
What we know from our experience is that given the controls and safeguards we have in our production facilities it is virtually impossible for any foreign object to enter any container during the bottling process. All of our containers enter our facility on pallets in our warehouse and remain covered until the moment they are placed on our high-speed filling lines. Once on the filling lines, they are inverted and rinsed out before they are filled and capped.
We have offered to dispatch a courier to pick up the product to take it out for testing by a third party forensics laboratory, but the consumer has declined this request. This lab would be able to analyze any rodent that got into the product, determine how it entered the container and even inspect the contents of its stomach. This process can take 6-8 weeks to yield conclusive findings. Until we have the opportunity to review the contents, we don't have a way to do a full investigation.
Regardless, Graves says that the family may get a lawyer to handle the incident.
According to KPRC, Kayden's pediatrician did blood work and a urine analysis to see if the tainted soda affected him, but the results are not in yet.
Related: Soda sizes in the U.S.
(h/t Rare)
