I like that the article really tries to make no effort to explain why there are 2.5cm rubber balls in 6 different products. Even the most basic question of "wot kinda ball" is completely avoided.
Just for the record I am absolutely destroyed on tequila and have no idea how i found this article. I assumed I coypasted it from here while sending it to friends elsewhere. I do not remember making this thread
You run a small batch of test product through with the balls in, then dump that product. They're used to calibrate metal detectors on the at the very end of the production line that for detecting things like shavings or flakes of metal coming off the machinery. It's likely that the batch wasn't dumped immediately, and left unsupervised - so someone came along and packaged it because it wasn't in a container that was well marked as a test sample to be disposed of.
Food production safety can often be horrendously lax, because virtually all staff will skip or ignore parts of the production plan, either intentionally or unintentionally. Worse still, I've seen managers specifically write food safety plans that are designed to be cheated, for example, ensuring that a specific test sample is treated as it should be to meet all of the paperwork requirements, while all the food that will actually be eaten is handled at much lower standards.
I saw a little black ball inside of winco cottage cheese. Happened twice in a row so I don't think it was pepper. Haven't been able to bring myself to get one of america's premier lowfat dairy products since.