‘I’m gonna throw up and cry’: A woman says she found a maggot on her wooden spoon, then spotted another trapped inside her Ninja CREAMi lid

A California-based content creator had just started to dig into her healthy snack, courtesy of a Ninja CREAMi, when she noticed a maggot-like worm on her spoon. Arriella then took to Instagram (arriellasimons_) and TikTok (arriiiixo) to share that the maggots seemed to have come from inside the lid of the kitchen appliance. The video blew up, getting well over 10 million views.

The video started with Arriella holding up a Ninja CREAMi container, saying, “I was just eating this Ninja CREAMi.” As she put it down, she continued, “I’m gonna throw up and cry. And on my wooden spoon was like, a like, a parasite. like a literal. like a maggot.” As she paced around her kitchen, she told her viewers that she only used four ingredients and checked them all, including the milk and protein powder.

“We look at the blender, which I clean every single night, because I make these Ninja CREAMies every night. Trigger warning. There are like parasites or maggots or whatever,” she said, and lifted the lid of the appliance into view, where, on the right, a small maggot-like worm is visible. Arriella claimed, “It is literally trapped inside this thing, and there is no way… We cannot figure out how to take this off and clean it.”

The internet was horrified

Arriella finished her video by saying, “That’s a health hazard. Ninja CREAMi, please. I’m freaking out.” Maggots have turned up in other viral food videos, including one where a New York man said he found a maggot near his broccoli in a Whole Foods hot bar order. Finding them inside a machine had many of Arriella’s viewers rethinking the appliance, with one user writing, “IMMEDIATELY took this off of my wedding registry. Thank you.”

Some commenters, however, thought the fault might lie with Arriella, claiming that she wasn’t cleaning the product correctly. The comments also identified the worms as fruit fly larvae, with one person noting, “They like sugar and moisture. They die if they dry out.”

In a follow-up post, Arriella told her viewers that after finding the larvae, she hosed the lid down. Then she sprayed it with Lysol, soaked it in vinegar, scrubbed it with a tiny brush, and ran it in a high-heat dishwasher cycle. Despite these efforts, she claimed that “there was still a maggot in there,” although this time, it was dead. She also mentioned that Ninja was sending her a new machine.

Ninja later uploaded a “How to” cleaning video to Instagram, though it is unclear whether the post was a response to Arriella’s video. The only demonstrated way to clean the lid was to pour water through it, which left some commenters unsatisfied. One commenter told the company that they had cleaned the appliance that way since the beginning and that Ninja’s response didn’t acknowledge that “there are parts that you can’t access and can build up moisture.” Others urged the company to redesign the product entirely.

Ninja has not publicly addressed Arriella’s specific claims, and Attack of the Fanboy was unable to independently verify her account, which comes from her Instagram and TikTok posts.