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Angry dad Alan Robson got hot under the collar when he bought a spicy salad dressing from Asda – which was a year out of date.

Alan had poured the Pizza Express house dressing over a salad as his family sat down to eat when they noticed the best before date on the bottle was July 2012.

The shocked residential child care officer emailed Asda’s customer care team and wanted an apology from the manager via a private phone call, but says he was fobbed off with an email offering a replacement or money back. “We couldn’t believe that the salad dressing was a year out of date,” said Alan, 42, of Walker, Newcastle.

“I bought it from Asda in Hadrian Road in Wallsend and to my horror it was 12 months out of date. I had fed the sauce to my partner and children. I’m disgusted at the fact that Asda would sell food so out of date without any safety net to get this type of food off the shelves.

“Normally a product of this type has a shelf life of about one year. If this product was put out fresh then that means it would have been on the shelf for two years without being checked.”

Alan and partner Lisa Hodgkins, 39, had prepared a meal of chicken, jacket potato and salad for children, Zoe, 15, and Meg, 13, and had poured the sauce on top. Alan added: “Zoe and Meg said they didn’t like the taste and said it had a funny smell.

“At first I thought it was teenagers being fussy but then Lisa looked at the bottle and saw the best before date was July 19, 2012. I literally spat my food out. I sent Asda an email and their reply was for me to get my money back or swap it for another one.

“I thought my complaint at least merited a personal phone call from the manager. But that never came. I felt it was just brushed under the carpet but surely something that is on the shelf that out of date deserves a ‘sorry ’in person.” Alan says he is taking his custom elsewhere from now on.

“I went back to the store and saw all of the salad dressings of that type were gone. I don’t know if all of them were a year out of date, but they had all been removed.”

A spokesman for Asda said staff check the date of products on shelves in all stores on a regular basis throughout the day and when replenishing stock the procedure is that newer dated items are put to the back of ones already on shelves.

He said: “We have stringent procedures in all our stores to make sure out-of-date products don’t hang around on the shelves.

“We apologise to the customer for this isolated incident and have refreshed our daily checking process in the Wallsend store.”