A Burger King near Buffalo, New York temporarily closed over the weekend after a customer found blood in her daughter’s food.
On July 26, New York resident Tiffany Floyd posted a TikTok video about a distressing experience with her four-year-old daughter Matayla at a Burger King in Getzville, New York.
“Today I went to Burger King by my house,” Floyd says, adding that she got a kids meal for her daughter consisting of a burger and fries. “Obviously, I’m a busy mom, I just gave her the bag to eat the food.”
Get top local stories in Connecticut delivered to you every morning. Sign up for NBC Connecticut's News Headlines newsletter.
Driving away from the fast-food spot, Matayla begins to eat, taking a bite out of her burger before noticing something was amiss.
“I heard, ‘Mom, I don’t want ketchup,’ so I take the bag back thinking that they messed up our order,” she continues, before using her rubber-gloved hand to show her daughter’s burger to the camera. “I look in her bag and there is blood all over her bag, her toys, her fries, everything.”
Floyd says she then pulled over and called Burger King to ask what was going on with her food, and the manager told her that a worker injured his finger right before making and bagging their order, and that if she came back, she could get a refund.
U.S. & World
So, she decided to call her local health department and file a report.
“I just wanted to get this out there because it was lunchtime today, and there was a lot of people through the drive-thru,” the mom says, sharing the location of the Burger King on the video. “This is a serious issue, and now I have to wait a whole month to get my daughter tested for any blood issues.”
Her video went viral, garnering more than 8 million views, 1 million likes and over 12,000 comments, many sympathizing with the mom as well as offering her advice on what to do next.
“It was just emotionally disturbing, I couldn’t believe it,” Floyd tells TODAY.com.
“I yelled at my daughter to spit out whatever she had in her mouth. She did,” she says, adding that when she first saw the blood, she didn’t want to jump to any conclusions, which is why she called the store.
“(The manager) was so nonchalant about it,” Floyd says. “At that moment, that’s when I started getting livid.”
“We were deeply upset and concerned to learn of this incident,” a Burger King representative tells TODAY.com. “We have been in contact with the Guest and are working with her to resolve this incident. This incident was the result of a team member in the restaurant who injured his finger, and upon noticing immediately stepped away.”
The representative also says that Burger King closed the restaurant over the weekend to retrain all the team members and hired an external company to complete a deep cleaning, adding that all team members were fully paid for any lost shifts during the temporary shutdown.
The location in question reopened on Monday, July 29.
Floyd says, as a result of the incident, her daughter hasn’t been eating.
“We went to the doctor’s yesterday to see her pediatrician, today we have to go see a psychiatrist,” Floyd says. “We have a children’s hospital in Buffalo, I have to go to the infectious disease control unit, as well, and that’s when she will get her blood work done.”
After mulling over what to do in a follow-up video posted on July 28, Floyd says she has retained a lawyer.
“I don’t care if it’s a drop of blood, or in this case, what it was. There’s protocol,” Floyd says. “Something that has to be done, and someone has to be held accountable for this, because this is not right.”
This story first appeared on TODAY.com. More from TODAY:
