‘Traumatized Until Further Notice’: Florida Woman Buys Canned Chili Sauce From Trader Joe’s. Then She Opens It—And Realizes She Got More Than She Bargained For

A TikTok creator is suddenly going viral for a cooking video that took a very unexpected turn.

Erin Rose (@erinnroseeeeee), who regularly posts health, nutrition, and recipe content, says she was filming herself making a batch of chili—something she does often—when things went sideways.

“Casually just making chili when this happens,” she wrote on the text overlay of her clip. The video shows her stirring a pot filled with ground beef and yellow bell peppers. But when she goes to add what appears to be tomato sauce, something unidentified slips out of the sealed can and drops straight into the pot.

“What the f—?” Rose says, jolted by what she just caught on camera. “Oh my God. I think I have to throw this out.”

In her caption, Rose told viewers she was “traumatized until further notice.” She also tried to head off accusations that the whole thing was staged, explaining that the can originally had a label before she peeled it off while cleaning.

“This is not a skit,” she wrote. “I always record videos of my cooking, and what I thought would be a normal chili video turned into this. The can was bought from Trader Joe’s.”

As of Tuesday, the clip had already drawn more than 2.1 million views—and plenty of questions about what exactly fell into her chili.

What’s A SCOBY?

So… what was that?

Though it is not immediately clear what Rose found in the can, the most-liked comment on her post guessed what it was.

“That’s a SCOBY,” they wrote.

A SCOBY is actually an acronym for Symbiotic Culture of Bacteria and Yeast—or, a mixture of bacteria and yeast. REAL suggests you might be better off Googling what a SCOBY looks like, because if you haven’t ever seen one, you might not be able to spot it. The outlet reports that it’s “certainly not like anything you have seen before.”

“Scobys have been likened to aliens … or a jellyfish,” the outlet notes. “They are not the prettiest of things to look at.”

SCOBYs are OK in some food. Various outlets say they are perfectly normal, for instance, in kombucha. But there’s no evidence suggesting this is a natural occurrence in canned food. If anything like that shows up in a can, it usually points to a failed seal. That seal is what protects the food during processing, and once it breaks, outside air and bacteria can get in. When that happens, the food becomes the perfect environment for dangerous bacteria to grow.

What Should You Do If You Come Across One?

If you ever find yourself in a situation like that of Rose’s—where you open a can and find something that looks like a SCOBY floating inside—the best course of action is to throw the whole thing out. Any unexpected blob, film, mold, or growth in a sealed can means something went wrong with the product long before you touched it. And yes, consuming certain bacteria can make you seriously sick.

That includes the one you really do not want to mess with: Clostridium botulinum. Canned foods with low acidity, like vegetables and meat, give this bacterium exactly what it wants. It can produce a potent, often invisible toxin. You will not always see or smell clues that something is wrong.

The SCOBY-like layer people often recognize from kombucha is not the same thing in a can. Kombucha forms its pellicle in a highly acidic environment. Canned goods usually are not acidic enough for that. What you are seeing is far more likely to be another kind of bacterial colony or mold, and none of it is safe to eat.

If you ever run into this, do not taste it or try to salvage the rest of the food. Just be safe—and preserve your health—and toss it in the trash. And if you have other cans stored nearby, give them a quick check for bulging or leaks.

Viewers Are Grossed Out By Woman’s Find

People flocked to Rose’s comments to say they were just as horrified as she was by the mystery blob that fell out of her can of tomatoes.

One woman summed up the mood with “I would be angry for at least a week.”

Someone else urged her to take things further, writing, “Girl, press charges.” A third viewer kept it brief with a simple “Yuckkk.”

Plenty of commenters also tried to pin the blame on Washington, arguing that the state can point to relaxed federal food oversight.

“People are really seeing the effects of FDA and government budget cuts this season,” one person wrote.

“It’s almost like we used to have FDA regulations for a reason,” another said.

Others focused less on politics and more on the sheer luck of catching the problem in time.

“K but … Imagine if u only needed half that can for the recipe and u ended up eating it without seeing what’s at the bottom,” one person said. Another tried to lighten the mood, commenting, “Your chili has yellow bell peppers in it, so maybe it was ok to throw out.”

BroBible has reached out to Rose via a direct message on TikTok and to Trader Joe’s through its media request form.