Redditor No-Illustrator-149 reached out for help after finding a bizarre chunk of plastic in their Chick-fil-A salad, and a hazardous chemical lab worker solved the mystery. But as one comment noted, “hazardous chemicals” are not what you want to hear while you’re eating lunch.
No-Illustrator-149 shared two pictures of the strange, small plastic chunk in their meal, and captioned the post, “What is this broken piece of plastic found in my Chick-fil-A salad?” A comment noted right away, “Oh wow, I work with hazardous chemicals in a lab and know EXACTLY what that is!” calling it the broken tip of a plastic drum strap.
The comment added, “We use [them] all the time here, and I had one literally right next to me,” sharing a photo of a similar-looking piece of plastic still attached to the strap, noting they use friction to hold 55-gallon drums together on pallets.
This seemed to settle the matter, but a comment in the thread pointed out, “The worst words to hear in response to ‘What’s this thing I found in my salad‘ is definitely ‘Well, I work in a hazardous chemicals lab, and…'”
So what’s going on here?
Elsewhere in the thread, comments noted that these kinds of straps are used for other purposes related to food service, but you still don’t want broken-off chunks in your salad. It’s unclear if No-Illustrator-149 reached out to Chick-fil-A, or if Chick-fil-a has commented on the matter.
One comment from an ex Chick-fil-A manager said in part, “Other than the pickle buckets, I can’t off the top of my head think of another giant bucket found in the back of house … so unless packaging has changed from my time there, I don’t know where this would be used past maybe the pickle buckets.”
Another offered this explanation,
Are the greens prepared/chopped in-house? Most packaged foods only screen for metal, so I could see this entering the greens somewhere earlier in the supply chain and not caught because it is the perfect material to infiltrate a metal detector.”
Another suggested it could be the dressing, or even leftover from the lettuce harvesting, noting that the harvester could have dropped the strap in the field after servicing the farming equipment. The equipment came along, pulled the salads out of the ground, and ground up the strap, which continued through production as pieces, failed to be removed during screening, and wound up in a salad bag at Chick-fil-A, the comment said.
No matter what, a former health inspector noted Chick-fil-A will want to know about the discovery, so it doesn’t happen again. “Whatever you think of Chick-fil-A, they take food safety extremely seriously. Chick-fil-A will definitely want to know that OP found it. They will want to prevent it from happening again.”
Published: Feb 20, 2026 04:09 pm