Hastings mother ‘disgusted’ to find bacon in her McDonald’s veggie wrap from Polegate drive-through

Becky Davis ordered the ‘spicy veggie’ wrap from the McDonald’s drive-through in Polegate on February 25 around 5.20pm on the way home from a day at Drusillas Park with her family.

She said she was ‘in tremendous shock and disgusted’ to find a slice of bacon in the vegetarian wrap.

Becky had a conversation with an automatic customer service chat on February 27 to explain what happened, and what followed was a series of emails between herself and the customer service team.

Becky said she complained to the store manager on February 27 and was offered two meal replacements to use at a later date.

In her email to the company on February 28 Becky said, “I had taken a couple of bites and I believe I must have actually swallowed some! I have been a vegetarian for over 30 years and I feel revolted to have been given meat at one of your restaurants.

“Whilst I can understand how an unordered slice of bacon gets put in a meat option by accident, the fact that it was put in a vegetarian option strikes me as someone’s idea of a sick joke.

“I felt so upset I was shaking and unable to think straight.”

She asked for the incident to be looked into further and argued two meal replacements is ‘certainly no compensation’.

In response to Becky’s email McDonald’s customer service team said, “I would like to reassure you that, as a company, we do place great emphasis on order accuracy as there is a growing demand for personal preference for dietary and religious reasons or likes or dislikes.

“All staff are trained to assist in any way they can to accommodate specific requests. I am again very sorry that despite the importance placed on order accuracy, you have been let down on this occasion.”

Yesterday (March 1) she was sent vouchers totalling £15 in value with minimum spend conditions. However, Becky isn’t happy with this response and feels her complaint hasn’t been taken seriously.

The customer service team said, “Providing 100 per cent customer satisfaction is our aim, but we have clearly fallen short of your expectations. There are no excuses for this, and we’re sorry it seems like things haven’t improved.

“Please be assured that all of your feedback and your further comments have been passed through as we have followed this procedure to ensure that the restaurant improves upon their service and we’re confident you’ll see those improvements on your future visits to the restaurant.

“Please be advised that the voucher is a gesture of goodwill, and is not intended to cover the full costs of your meal or as further compensation, we would not be able to send out an additional gesture of good will.”

When Becky replied saying how unhappy she was with this response, the same email was sent by the customer service team.

Following this back and forth, Becky said McDonald’s have shown ‘little interest’ in the incident.

A spokesperson for McDonald’s said, “We take order accuracy extremely seriously at McDonald’s, we’d like to apologise to Ms Davis that we have not met our high standards on this occasion.

“We understand that Ms Davis has been in contact with our customer services department who have also offered our apologies and sent Ms Davis a voucher as a gesture of good will.”