needles found in sandwiches on Delta flights from Amsterdam

By Chellie Cervone - Posted: Jul 17, 2012 at 1:55 am

What appears to be sewing needles found in sandwiches on Delta flights from Amsterdam has prompted Delta to serve prepackaged food while the matter is being investigated.

The Wall Street Journal reported that the needles found in sandwiches on Delta flights from Amsterdam were served to those seated in the business class section on 4 Delta flights traveling from Amsterdam to the US.

There have been varying reports as to just how many of the “needles” have been found. The latest count is at 6.

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One passenger was injured but declined medical attention when the plane landed in Minneapolis.

It appears that passengers found some of the needles and USA Today is reporting that a Federal Air Marshall found one

The sandwiches served on the Delta Flights from Amsterdam to the United States are supplied by Gate Gourmet in Amsterdam and they are said to be fully cooperating in the investigation.

The Gate Gourmet website lists their Company Head Office in Zurich-Airport, Switzerland and one of their specialties is airline food.

Gate Gourmet’s opening statement says that they are a leading provider of freshly prepared food for the airline industry and they specifically mention safety. To emphasize the attention to food safety, they boast, for example, of performing, “between 800-1200 daily food safety checks as part of our continuous-safety operational system” at Dulles airport in Washington DC.

Many are wondering what could have gone wrong. Could it have been a disgruntled employee at gate Gourmet? With so many food safety checks that they claim to perform on a daily basis, is it possible that someone could have slipped a needle into the sandwiches so many different times?

What about the Delta flight attendants? Their actions will likely be highly scrutinized since they are ones that actually prepare the food before serving it to the airline guests. They are probably already in the process of comparing the names of the flight attendants working on the planes affected to see if there is perhaps a flight attendant or another airline employee that was on all of the flights or some other commonality in order to determine if someone placed the needles found in sandwiches on Delta flights from Amsterdam or if there is some other, as of yet, undetermined reason.

Delta said the airline “is taking this matter extremely seriously and is cooperating with local and federal authorities who are investigating.”