By Vince Gasparini | October 7, 2023
After a long day of classes and an exam, junior accounting major Hinna Fletcher picked up a fruit cup from the The Fruit Bar in the University at Albany Campus Center, which she, along with many other students at the university, is a frequent customer of.
While enjoying her fruit cup —which included an assortment of strawberries, mangoes, and blackberries— Fletcher noticed what she at first thought to be a leaf on one of the blackberries.
“I brought it closer to brush the leaf off and I realized it wasn’t a leaf,” she said. “It was a maggot.”
Photo Credit: Hinna Fletcher
After finding several more pieces that similarly contained fruit fly larvae in them, Fletcher said she went back to The Fruit Bar and showed the staff before making her way to Student Health Services.
“Very unfortunate situation,” Josh Hubbard, Regional Director for Sodexo, the university's food vendor, told the ASP. “I want to stress that food safety is of the absolute most importance to us at UAlbany Dining.”
Hubbard said that after staff was alerted of the incident, all blackberries were removed from service at The Fruit Bar and Sodexo was made aware.
“I think one of the things to stress is that this was a frozen ingredient,” Hubbard said. “There are different protocols that come with how we handle all sorts of different types of food, but in this case, this is really about a defective product, not a defective ingredient and not really how we handled it.”
Hubbard also said that their safety manager will be doing re-trainings to ensure that the staff remains vigilant in looking for food quality or safety issues.
“This was very isolated, no one else reported anything like this,” he said. “And while we can certainly understand this incident may cause students to be somewhat weary, just reinforcing, it was isolated.”
He added that blackberries will not be added back to The Fruit Bar, and that Sodexo is looking into how the food was able to make it to being served.
Previous issues with food quality and safety in the Campus Center have been documented by the ASP; in February of 2023, one student found an expired cheese stick in the 518 Market's refrigerator. Hubbard emphasizes that if students have concerns with food safety they are encouraged to reach out to the managers on site.
“There’s a huge commitment from this team to make sure that we are focused on the best possible outcomes” he said. “And I think that kind of feedback and that kind of communication is also a big part of enhancing the trust on campus and making people feel comfortable.”
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