Delallo gluten-free Pasta- Was My Package Contaminated?

[Ashland]

Dear fellow Celiacs,

 

Has anyone else had a gluten reaction after eating Delallo’s Gluten Free pasta??

 

Allow me to introduce myself.  My name is Stephanie, I’m 35, and I live in a lovely little mountain town in Oregon.  I was diagnosed with Celiac 13 years ago and haven’t touched gluten since.

 

However, I occasionally get hit.  Most recently, it was during a dinner party that I was hosting.  I ate the same things as the other guests (who are not Celiac).  Everyone felt fine and no one got sick other than myself.  Since we all ate the same ingredients, I’m ruling out food poisoning. 

 

Which leaves me with the unsettling idea that the Delallo gluten-free pasta had some gluten in it.  The fusilli pasta that I cooked was darker than usual and had these black flecks in it that I had never seen in their pasta before (I frequently bought their products).  I know that Delallo produces whole wheat pasta in a separate facility, so I was wondering if a box of the gluten-free fusilli bags accidentally made it to the whole wheat facility and were filled with gluten pasta.

 

My reaction was violent.  I truly think that the gluten-free fusilli bags were filled with gluten pasta and that I ate a bowl of gluten.

 

Has anyone else reacted to Delallo’s gluten-free pasta?

 

You can stop reading here and let me know if you’ve ever had a Delallo reaction, but if you’d like to read on, then I will tell you about how I contacted the company to send a second bag of gluten-free pasta that had similar black flecks and was darker- and how they “lost” my sample and then denied ever receiving it.  It was very suspicious.

 

Ok, so you know the basics.  I cooked a gluten-free dinner with a bag of gluten free Delallo fusilli that was darker than normal and had black flecks in it.  No one else got sick, but I had a violent reaction four hours later.

 

I immediately called Delallo, since I still had a bag of gluten-free pasta in my cupboard that was also dark with black flecks.  I spoke with their Manager of Food Safety and Quality.  He arranged for FedEx to pick up my bag of suspicious pasta and mail it to himself so that he could test it locally for gluten.

 

We went back and forth.

- Through the tracking number, I saw that it arrived at his facility.

-He said it arrived at the main office and asked them to send the package to him. 

-Then he repeated what is on their packaging about having their gluten-free pasta made in a separate facility and that it’s tested by a 3^rd party.

-I thanked him for the information I already knew and reminded him that I was hoping to get results from the package of dark/black specked pasta that I had sent him.

-He said he’d send a sample to the lab for gluten testing.

-Then he said he never received the pasta I sent and didn't know what could have happened to it.

-Then he reminded me that they have their gluten-free pasta tested by a 3^rd party (and sent me the results of that test in Italy), but forgetting that I wasn’t after that information to begin with.  He didn’t understand why I thought the gluten-free pasta had gluten in it since he told me repeatedly that the gluten-free pasta from Italy gets tested by a 3^rd party.

-I tried to remind him that it looked like there was gluten pasta in the gluten-free bag, indicating that maybe a box of gluten-free bags made it into the whole wheat facility and thus were not tested before heading to the marketplace, but we'll NEVER KNOW because he said he never got the sample and that was that.

 

So I’m turning to the Celiac community to see if anyone else has had a gluten reaction to Delallo’s Gluten Free pasta.

 

If I’m the only one, then I’ll happily return to eating Delallo and assume it was a stomach bug.

 

I look forward to hearing what you all have experienced.

 

Many thanks,

Stephanie

 

[kareng]

We eat it quite often. They do have different ingredients. I usually get the all rice ones which are darker than the corn and rice ones. But we also use the corn based ones sometimes

[pasqualeb]

Hello Miss Stephanie,

 

No reaction to that brand yet.  I die get violently sick from Tates cookies,but mostly my fault, pkg. for gluten-free and gluten  cookies looks pretty much the same, they do say gluten free on the good ones, but easy to confuse. Good news however, they are changing the pkg. for gluten-free cookies soon......pasquale

[Panama]

I'm sorry about your interaction with the Delallo company. They should have been more responsive to your complaints.

You said that you hosted a dinner party which included non celiacs. Was everything on the menu gluten free? Were there other celiacs who were at the party, ate the pasta and didn't get sick? Are you sure that the non celiacs didn't bring in any gluten to the party inadvertently?  It may have been the pasta that you reacted to or it could have been some other food item.

[pasqualeb]

thank you for your response, the gluten problem however was with my daughter not me , please see the original post. Quite sure however no gluten from any other source was present...pasquale