A 78-year-old woman from Washington passed away months before her 60th wedding anniversary after consuming a mislabelled cookie, according to her family. Peggy Bryant experienced a fatal allergic reaction after eating a peanut butter cookie that was incorrectly labelled as an oatmeal raisin cookie in April 2023. Her daughter, Lisa Bishop, recounted that Bryant had purchased the cookies from Safeway in Duvall, Washington, and immediately realized something was amiss after tasting it.
“My mom loved oatmeal raisin cookies,” Bishop stated. “She realized that the cookie she was eating was actually a peanut butter cookie, and she’s deathly allergic to peanuts.” Bryant was rushed to a nearby hospital but succumbed to her condition within an hour. The King County Coroner determined the cause of death as anaphylaxis, a severe allergic reaction that caused her blood vessels to collapse.
In response, Bryant’s family filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Safeway. Nearly a month later, Albertsons Companies, Inc., which owns Safeway, issued a voluntary recall of the oatmeal raisin cookies sold at the Duvall location due to an undeclared peanut and soy allergen. The recall applied to 18-count cookies sold between April 5 and April 17, 2023. The recall notice stated that a package of cookies was labelled as oatmeal raisin but may have contained peanut butter cookies, omitting peanuts and soy from the ingredient list.
Lisa Bishop emphasized the preventable nature of the tragedy: “Do the right thing. I don’t want it to happen to anybody else. Labels are there for a reason, and I don’t want anybody else to die from mislabelling.”
This incident echoes a similar case in January 2024, where a 25-year-old dancer in New York City died after eating incorrectly labelled holiday cookies from Stew Leonard’s supermarket due to a severe peanut allergy.
— new from New York Post