If you didn't like kale before, you're probably not about to start now.

If you didn’t like kale before, you’re probably not about to start now.

A shopper at a Washington, D.C. Trader Joe’s got an unpleasant surprise when she got home to unload her bag of groceries on Tuesday. Inside a bag of cut, cleaned and ready to cook kale, Grace Goldstein found a “very dead” lizard.

Get push notifications with news, features and more.

Upon first glance, the tiny, full grown lizard caused a bit of confusion, Goldstein tells PEOPLE. “It was a back and forth between denial and horror, which amounted to a lot of asking my boyfriend to see the bag of kale and identify the lizard and shrieking and pushing it away and refusing to go near it…and then asking to see it again,” she said.

The project manager then proceeded to place the bag of greens in her freezer to preserve the reptile.

Image zoom

“We had reached out to TJ corporate and weren’t sure if we were also going to bring it back to the local store where we bought it and didn’t want a decomposing lizard in the fridge,” Goldstein said. “It’s a little too close to my late night ice cream for comfort.”

A representative for the supermarket chain confirmed to PEOPLE that they are investigating her complaint. “We are committed to providing customers with great products of the highest quality and are currently working with our vendor to look into and address the matter,” the spokesperson said in a statement.

Shortly after the incident, Goldstein’s friend Kate Berner uploaded a photo of the lizard kale on Twitter and inspired other TJ’s enthusiasts to share their unfortunate finds in food products. One user posted a photo of a “2 feet long” piece of hair that came out of an ice cream sandwich.