Nine-Year-Old Girl Finds Real Diamond Wedding Band in a Snack Bag of Goldfish Crackers

July 15th, 2014

When a kid pulls open a snack bag of Pepperidge Farm’s Goldfish crackers, all she expects to find are delicious cheese-flavored morsels in the shape of smiling tiny fish.

Unlike Cracker Jacks, which has distributed more than 23 billion prizes — including rings— over the past 101 years, Pepperidge Farm's Goldfish brand had never given away a single ring over its 52-year history.

All that changed last week when a nine-year-old in South Carolina discovered a real diamond wedding band swimming with the fish crackers.

"I opened up [the bag] and I asked my mom, 'Is there supposed to be a ring in here?'" adorable Peyton Postol of Boiling Springs, S.C., told CBS affiliate WSPA.

"I took one look and then I took a double take. Sure enough it was a real ring," Peyton’s mom, Stephanie, told ABC 4 Utah.

Both surprised and outraged, Stephanie Postol wondered how a ring could have gotten into her daughter’s snack. It was presumed that a worker at a plant in Colorado or Utah, where Goldfish crackers are manufactured, may have lost the jewelry.

A spokesperson for Pepperidge Farm said the company is taking this incident very seriously. “We have in place a number of processes to avoid something like this from happening," Anna Burr told ABC 4 Utah.

Pepperidge Farm has asked the Postols to return the ring and the pack of Goldfish in which it was found so the company might determine how the jewelry got through its quality-control system, which includes a sensitive metal detector.

A tour of the Pepperidge Farm plant in Utah would reveal a mammoth operation that produces 3,000 Goldfish every second and more than 60 million pounds of the product each year. Line workers wear hairnets and gloves — and are prohibited from wearing jewelry — so it’s hard to figure how a ring could have slipped into the packaging.

Goldfish is the third-most-popular cracker brand in the U.S., just behind Nabisco Ritz crackers and Sunshine Cheez-It crackers. In 2012, Goldfish boasted $423.4 million in sales.