Sam’s Club Shopper Opens the Bag of Bread Flour She Bought And Finds Several Odd Chunks Inside
In the HBO series The Last of Us, the flour supply sold in the world becomes contaminated with a mysterious "zombie" fungus. In real life, a cookie baked from moldy or fungal flour will not turn you into a zombie, but it will surely unlock a raw fear inside you, as it did to a woman named MaKayla Peglow. Peglow ordered King Arthur’s bread flour from Sam’s Club. From the outside, the packet looked as normal as it should have been. But when she ripped the seal, she was grossed out. A Facebook user, Sourdough Starters (@Sourdough-Starters), shared some pictures of what Peglow found inside her packet that left her in pure unease.
“Ordered some bread flour from Sam’s Club and had it shipped, found these chunks with the weird color to them. First time I’ve ever bought bread flour. Is this normal? I had a friend give me some of her starter, and she gave me some bread flour, and I’m almost out of that and ordered this to feed my starter, but now I’m sketched out to use it,” Peglow said, according to the post. Below this note, the post contained some pictures Peglow had snapped after making the unpleasant discovery in her unbleached flour packet.
In the pictures, Peglow holds out the bread flour in her palms. Instead of a typical powder, the flour appears to have been coagulated into clumpy masses, probably because moisture succeeded in penetrating the flour packet. Sitting in her hands, the clumpy masses resemble dusty blocks of chalky white rocks smeared with odd blemishes that look greenish and slimy. Other photos reveal similar nubbles of wettened flour, the color of white moonlight stained with shadowy pores of mold. “It looks like the bag got wet and molded and then dried,” Carla Grant, another Facebook user, commented on the photos.
Other users affirmed that the greenish and slimy particles in the crumbly flour were indeed mold. Many urged her to return the packet to the shopkeeper or contact the company. “Throw the whole bag out, you don't know what could be in it,” cautioned Beth LaSalle. A woman named Chelle Wing brought to attention that this was almost the tenth case of mold in KA’s flour that she came across, which frightened her, because she too had bought some packets of the same. “I don't know what's going on with KA bread from Sam's, but this is like the 10th time I've seen someone encounter this in the past week. Makes me worry, because I have two unopened bags sitting in my cupboard,” she wrote in the comments section of the March 2025 post.
Olivia Gongora Waegner said, “I've never seen that. Send your photo to the grocer and King Arthur. It looks like it was stored improperly.” While the mold could have been a shipment or storage facility hiccup, no one can say that for sure. For people who might encounter a similar issue with their newly bought flour, Healthline explains that the best way to tell if your flour has gone bad is to smell it. "Bad flour smells off—it can be stale, musty, or almost sour. It may also look discolored," the website explains, adding that the ideal storage for the flour is an airtight location where moisture can’t reach. Even though eating your freshly-baked chocolate-chip cake will not turn you into a zombie, why take a chance?