Pizza horror: Vegetarian finds his Tesco margherita covered in pork (From Sutton Guardian)

Tesco Margherita pizza covered in pork, discovers shocked Sutton vegetarian

9:00am Thursday 14th March 2013 in News By Sophia Sleigh, Reporter

A vegetarian man became ill after eating a meat covered pizza from Tesco which had been wrongly packaged.

Dhruv Joshi, 25, from Sutton, does not eat meat for religious and health reasons and was disgusted when he realised the Tesco’s Finest Margherita pizza he bought was covered in pork salami due to a factory fault which meant pizzas were wrongly packaged for half an hour.

Mr Joshi, a Hindu who had never eaten meat before, immediately went back to the store near his girlfriend’s home in Ealing Broadway to complain on Sunday March 3.

He was shocked to see even more pizzas on the shelf had been incorrectly packaged and was offered a £2 refund by a supervisor. Later he was offered £5 after he complained to the head office.

Mr Joshi, who works in currency trading for Lloyds TSB, said he had to take the Monday off work because he felt so ill. He returned to the store to find they were still selling the incorrectly packaged pizzas the next day - and he bought some more as proof.

However, this time a different manager told the head office straight away and Mr Joshi was offered £100.

He said: "It was a nightmare. The labelling said it was suitable for vegetarians so I bought it.

"I ate about a quarter of it and realised it wasn’t vegetarian. It was pretty traumatic really. I was vomiting in the evening.

"I was not feeling well but I went to the store again pretty much straight away and said I’m not really happy.

"The thing that really annoys me very much is on Monday I took a day off because I wasn’t very well after eating that pizza.

"I explained to them I had taken a day off work so I’m actually at a loss.

"It could be a bad mistake but the way they dealt with it is not good either."

A spokesperson for Tesco said: "Last week we found that a small batch of Salciccia pizzas had been incorrectly packed and immediately asked stores to withdraw the product. 

"We have spoken with our customer and we are very sorry that in this one store not all these pizzas were removed and that our customer was able to buy one."