Parents Fed Their Kids Dog Treats After Grocery Store Mixup

In the Scooby Doo, Where Are You! cartoons, the title dog and his chronically disheveled friend Shaggy had a tendency to eat the same meals, sharing gigantic club sandwiches or swallowing a handful of Scooby Snacks before investigating Mr. Barnstorm’s haunted circus. I’m pretty sure that Shaggy was always high AF, so he didn’t care that he was eating dog treats, but a group of kids in New Zealand were slightly less enthusiastic about it.

The Whanganui Pak’n Save grocery store put a display of Scooby Snacks-branded dog biscuits in an aisle that was also stocked with human snacks, which means that a lot of Kiwi kindergarteners now have strong teeth and thick, shiny coats. It’s hard to fault the parents who mistakenly bought a package or two: there’s a picture of Scooby Doo on the bag, and individual packets of carob-flavored, bone-shaped biscuits are far from being the most ridiculous snacks on the shelf.

According to the New Zealand Herald, Pak’n Save didn’t seem to realize its mistake until parents started to complain on Facebook. “I was absolutely mortified when I gave them to my daughter. She took one bite and said, ‘this is rubbish,’” one parent wrote. “I looked at the packet closely and gasped, ‘Oh no, I am so sorry. I just fed you dog food’.”

The store swiftly moved the Scooby Snacks to the pet food aisle, but has since removed them from their shelves entirely. “On reflection, we can see how the cartoon characters on the packaging might be confusing,” Antoinette Laird, a spokesperson for Pak’n Save’s parent company said. “We apologize for any distress this has caused to anyone who bought the product by mistake and will happily offer a refund to any customer in this position.”

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The Herald reports that Whanganui teachers have started checking children’s lunchboxes to make sure their students weren’t sent to school with Scooby Snacks. The snacks are reasonably safe for kids though: the manufacturer described the product as “human friendly, but not recommended,” which is also how I categorize most of the food at Carl’s Jr.

So yeah, the kids are going to be fine. Worst case, they dump their snacks in the trash. Best case, they figure out that Harry the Hypnotist was actually dressing up as the ghost clown, and Barnstorm’s circus is saved! Win, win.