Customer finding berry stems in pies, thoughts on adding a warning?

Good morning all!

My company makes pies, and we have recently had a rash of customer complaints from people who are finding berry stems in their pies (we did switch away from the problem supplier recently, so we're hoping the issue will disappear). On our cherry pies, we have a short disclaimer that the cherries are machine pitted and that pits/pit fragments may be present, which we adopted because other pie bakeries have similar statements.

We have a rigorous inspection process that the operators perform to check for inedible plant parts (stems, peach pit parts, apple core parts, etc), but since the parts are most often similar in color to the fruit, they do get missed sometimes. We've been discussing the idea of adding a disclaimer similar to what we have on the cherry pies to all of our other fruit pie varieties, but our sales team is worried that it will scare off customers.

Do any of you have experience with adding disclaimers like this to your labels? If so, do you have any tips on verbiage that will not scare off customers while still alerting them to the possibility? (Note: we are not trying to escape legal liability in any way, just trying to alert and hopefully protect our consumers)

Hi adiemert,

:welcome:

I don't think I've ever seen a warning of a fruit stalk in a product. Is this a quality or food safety issue? If quality then I don't think customers will be happy to find a stalk even if you have warned them.

For stones, they are obvious choking or injury hazards and these are the typical sort of notifications I see: