For just over two years we have always bought McCain’s oven chips. They are low in fat and as far as we were concerned very nice.
This all changed about 3 weeks ago when we cooked some chips and they came out smelling like pig manure, I kid you not, I have worked in a cattle market and I know what pigs smell like and this was exactly the whiff I was getting. The first thing we thought was that the freezer was playing up and that somehow the chips had defrosted and gone off or some such nonsense. We checked the rest of the stuff in the freezer and everything was fine, I know this because we always keep Vodka in the freezer and it was as syrupy as usual which indicated to me that the freezer was very cold.
Anyway, we bought another bag (previous bag from Tesco’s) from Asda’s several days later under the assumption that we had just got a dodgy bag, perhaps it had lay on the floor somewhere too long or defrosted and been refrozen once too often. Same bloody problem. You can imagine our consternation, we had been using this product religiously for two years. We then decided to clean the oven completely even thought it was fine.
Most people would just try and change brands at this point but we wanted to know exactly what was causing that pig shit smell so we went off to Iceland (the frozen food mecca of the UK) and got a bag out of their freezer. We came straight home and bunged a batch in the Oven. You’ll never guess what. PIG SHIT all over again. So there we have it.
McCains Oven Chips stink of pig manure, or at least the ones we have used recently do. We wrote a letter to them detailing our discovery a few days ago. We are awaiting a reply…………….. to be continued……………………..
Doesn’t surprise me.
I work 200 yards away from their Wombourne factory and the whole area stinks.
The local council have warned them several times about the smell. Not only does their factory stink, but just behind the building is an open sewage farm!
Have a look on multimap (aerial photos) of WV5 8AQ.
The off-white factory toward the bottom is McCains. Go up and left (11 o’clock) and you’ll see 3 round circles. Sewage pits.
Hi,
Did you get an answer from McCain?
I recently bought some ‘Roasted’ oven potato product and one of the potatoes was mouldy and I couldn’t spit it out fast enough.
(couldn’t find their website to contact, and found this site instead on Google).
Not sure if it’s worth complaining about 1 spore covered potato if your complaint didn’t get their response.
Yes, they regreted that we were unhappy with their products and they sent us some McCain couchers and a tray with holes in it.
The vouchers are worthless because every time we buy their chips and cook them they stink of ammonia.
The letter was the usual,
“Its not our fault….. you must remember that…… sometimes a bad pack escapes our notice……”
Rubbish, we purchased several packs from different stores and they all smelt like Pig Shit. I wish there was some way to see the complaints from a locality to see if anyone else had complained of a similar problem.
I suppose we should have reported it to the local Council and let them deal with it.
To top it off we have been using another manufactureers chips and have had no trouble at all so we can rule out our storage or preperation of them.