The vendy is almost empty this Fri­day. Some­one, other than me, has been eat­ing stuff from it. I hypoth­e­size that the folks work­ing all night on the 4^th floor are to blame. All that was left in the machine were things I’d already eaten [Muf­fin, Chicken Salad, Pickle] except for a chimichanga and what I ended up choos­ing today, Pierre Foods Fast Choice® Pizza Char­broil with Cheese.

First, a lit­tle more about Pierre Foods. Did you know that

Pierre Foods is a mem­ber of many indus­try orga­ni­za­tions including:

Amer­i­can Meat Insi­tute
Cana­dian Food & Bev­er­age Asso­ci­a­tion
National Asso­ci­a­tion of Truck Stop Oper­a­tors
and the NRA

and that their

…man­u­fac­tur­ing processes are con­ducted under Haz­ard Analy­sis Crit­i­cal Con­trol Point (HACCP) prin­ci­ples and mon­i­tor­ing pro­grams. HACCP in con­junc­tion with a sophis­ti­cated micro­bi­o­log­i­cal mon­i­tor­ing pro­gram of envi­ron­men­tal, equip­ment, and fin­ished prod­uct test­ing pro­vides the assur­ance for [their] cus­tomer that they will receive safe, whole­some, high qual­ity products.

Fully cook­ing [their] prod­ucts destroys harm­ful bac­te­ria and actual flame broil­ing and sear­ing with a bran­der gives our char­broiled prod­ucts a deli­cious “fresh off the grill” fla­vor. Grad­u­ated super­heated air ranges from 1000 F to 300 F pro­vid­ing supe­rior tex­ture and color. The prod­ucts are Indi­vid­u­ally Quick Frozen (IQF) to lock in fla­vor and assure shelf life. All of this ensures a con­sis­tent qual­ity prod­uct that is sure to sat­isfy every time.

That last block­quote sounds like some­thing out of an applied nuclear physics lab. All of that effort goes in to each sack of crap that I buy from the vendy. All that work, and it ends in fail­ure every time.

The Pierre Foods Fast Choice® Pizza Char­broil with Cheese is described as a

Sea­soned, flame­broiled beef patty topped with Ital­ian pizza sauce and one slice of moz­zarella cheese on a sesame seed bun.

I wasn’t quite cer­tain how one would char­broil a pizza, but I should have counted on Pierre Foods to be one step ahead of me in cre­at­ing a pizza fla­vored ham­burger. This bug­ger cost me $1.65 and weighed in at 5.2 ounces. The pizza sauce looked like some­thing scraped off the bot­tom of a dump­ster behind the worst Pizza Pan in exis­tence. The moz­zarella slice was unseen until it started ooz­ing out of the bun and looked like steam­ing spunk. The bun had the “full dia­per” feel­ing that every Pierre Foods prod­uct seems to have and the sesame seeds could have eas­ily been bee lar­vae. It tasted like a gravy/​pizza fla­vored cig­a­rette. This is the sec­ond worst thing I’ve eaten from the vend­ing machine. And it sup­plied me with 47% of my RDA of sat­u­rated fat. The rest of the nutri­tion info is here.