A man was left shocked and confused as he opened a carton of supermarket grapes and found a strange insect inside.

John Paulose, 42, bought several packs of the seedless black fruit online from Tesco and was eager to tuck in – until he got a nasty surprise.

“I picked up some grapes and that weird thing fell out – I just thought, ‘what the heck is that?’ and freaked out a bit,” the Plaistow procurement manager said.

“It was so big and strange. I poked it with a knife to make sure it was dead – I thought it could be foreign and dangerous.

“I was definitely glad it was dead.”

John was surprised to find the creepy-crawly in his grapes because he had read the Recorder’s story last week about an arachnophobe who found spiders in the same product.

“It concerns me that it seems to happen so frequently,” he said. “I’ll think twice before buying grapes from Tesco again – they really need to look into it.”

A spokesperson for Tesco said: “We sell over a million bunches of grapes every week and our growers work hard to clean and inspect all the fruit carefully. However, as the produce is so fresh instances like this do happen on very rare occasions. We’ve apologised to [Mr Paulose] and have offered him a gesture of goodwill.”