Old El Paso Taco Seasoning

[TheFugitive]

I recently made some tacos using an envelope of Old El Paso seasoning.
I was surprised when a red plastic cap fell out of the envelope along with the seasoning.

It looked to be either a cap from a container of some ingredient used to make the product,
or a cover off of a roller or some piece of machinery.  There is a consumer affairs address
on the back of the package so I wrote them a letter and sent them the envelope along with
the plastic cap.

A few weeks later I got a letter thanking me along with some coupons for free product.
I really only wanted to let them know about this so that they could check their production
lines and fix whatever caused this to happen.

The cap as I said was about the size of a nickel and was bright red, so no chance that
anybody in my family was going to actually eat it.

[shore72]

A company's response to something like this gives a clear view of whether any body is awake in their customer relations department. We've received coupons in the past after finding/reporting foreign objects in food from McDonald's and I seem to recall some cereal or granola from General Mills or maybe Kellogg. One the other hand, we bought some string cheese from Kraft that, upon unwrapping, was found to be dyed weird colors. They sent us a very odd form letter with a big, goofy happy face on it, stating that this was special promotion and the cheese was supposed to look like crayons (?!). Said nothing of the sort on the package!

My father used to like a certain brand of hairspray (might have been Aqua Net but I just can't recall). He was having trouble with cans that wouldn't work and didn't want to bother the druggist in our small town where he bought them. So, I wrote the company (it took a huge amount of searching for an address on the web-it was very clear they didn't want to be reached)and as I usually do in these cases, I typed up something and sent it snail mail. Never heard a response. A clear case, to me, of "we don't care".