That Time A Woman Found A Literal Razor Blade In Her Cracker Barrel Burger
Whatever your opinion is of Cracker Barrel, the traveler-friendly Southern food restaurant chain isn't exactly a stranger to controversy. Sometimes, these controversies can come off on the sillier side of things, like the time some Cracker Barrel fans called the company "woke" because the chain dared to introduce a vegetarian-friendly plant-based sausage to the menu.
But other times, the issues surrounding Cracker Barrel controversies are a lot more serious. Among them have even involved serious and downright dangerous food contamination problems. One location served an order of french fries with a side of human blood, to which Cracker Barrel responded by giving the customer who received the item a pair of $50 gift cards. And don't forget the time Cracker Barrel had to pay $9 million to a customer after it served him caustic cleaning liquid instead of water.
Out of that bevy of examples, there's an incident you've possibly forgotten about. In 2007, a customer was served (and actually partially ate) a razor blade found in her burger — and as far as what information is publicly available, it appears the customer in question neither asked for nor received any compensation for the incident.
The Cracker Barrel razor incident, explained
In 2007, 56-year-old Irene Grann ordered a burger at a Cracker Barrel in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, and very quickly found something was wrong. She complained that something was stuck in her throat after she began bleeding from the mouth, as the Associated Press reported at the time (via NBC News). The general manager found a piece of razor blade in the burger, and Grann was rushed to the hospital.
Incredibly, Grann didn't ultimately need stitches for her injuries during the incident. As an apparent safety precaution, Cracker Barrel subsequently pulled hamburger meat from over 300 different restaurant locations out of 557 across the United States, per the Associated Press.
Interestingly, there isn't much info about what happened beyond that. Grann purportedly gave no interviews to the press about her experience, and Cracker Barrel seemingly hasn't addressed the incident since it originally occurred. (There also appear to be no indications of a settlement between the chain and Grann on the public record.)
Another Cracker Barrel foreign object story resulted in jail time
While details on what happened after the Cracker Barrel razor incident might be somewhat sparse, another incident involving Cracker Barrel which occurred only a few years before turned out to be a bit more than an unfortunate accident. Indeed, it ended up being a bona fide hoax.
In 2004, Carla Patterson and Ricky Patterson, a mother and son duo, dropped a dead mouse in their soup with the intention of extorting Cracker Barrel for $500,000, as media outlets later reported. This backfired horribly when the company conducted a necropsy on the mouse and determined it had died prior to being discovered in the soup batch — meaning, it was dropped in after the soup had already been cooked. Ultimately, the pair was sentenced to one year in prison as a result of their attempted fraud (though they both originally faced up to 10 years in prison for the charges against them) and were fined $2,500 each.