A TikToker has some questions for Barilla after an unfortunate discovery put her pasta plans on hold.
“I just went to go make rigatoni,” Cameron Monette (@cameronmonette) explained to her followers last week, noting that the box she grabbed from her pantry doesn’t expire until March 2025.
But what she found had nothing to do with her pasta’s shelf life.
“Look, I put it in the pot, and I noticed one of them had this,” she said, pointing to a dark spot on the uncooked noodle. “And I was like what is that? So I scratch at it. That is a bug. And I look, and there’s more.”
All in all, Monette said she found bugs on 27 different noodles in the same previously unopened box of Barilla pasta.
“Well I’m not having rigatoni tonight,” she wrote.
Although the TikToker directed her comments at Barilla, some suggested the issue of what went wrong here may not have anything to do with the world’s largest pasta producer.
“As someone who cooks pasta on a weekly basis it’s either a problem with where you [bought] it from or how you stored it, not barilla’s fault here I have never had this happen!” wrote @xojillybeansxo.
“Flour beetles in your house or transport most likely, they are entering the end of the noodle and working their way up in all of them,” @phillipvonflavor suggested. “If there were bugs in production they’d be all over the noodle.”
It’s unclear from the video exactly what kind of bug Monette was dealing with, but weevils (aka flour bugs) can indeed lay eggs inside of foods like pasta and rice, which can then eventually eat their way out of the food product and wreak havoc by infesting your kitchen. According to the Spruce, it’s the kind of issue that needs to be addressed immediately—if you see a weevil, immediately throw the food out and clean your cupboards thoroughly.
@cameronmonette @barilla ♬ original sound – Cameron Monette
Regardless of the cause, simply seeing the bugs in Monette’s pasta put some viewers off.
“New fear unlocked,” @makslate admitted.
“I remember this happened to me one time I cried,” added @tnicole819, while @jess.banks18 declared, “I can never eat pasta again.”
The Daily Dot has reached out to @cameronmonette via TikTok comment and Barilla via email.
Update 1:29pm CT Jan. 2: In an email to the Daily Dot, a Barilla representative shared the following: “In all our production plants we have all the activities in place to effectively prevent the possible eventual presence of infestations. Auditing checks [are] done in a systematic way and the third party certification confirm that. It is very likely that this type of issue can have happened during the logistics / distribution path or during the storage phase.”