Pak'nSave Savey Meal-bot suggests recipes using toxic household chemicals
Pak'nSave's AI-powered Savey Meal-bot generated hazardous recipes, including a mixture creating chlorine gas, when users input non-food household items. The AI failed to recognize the danger of the ingredients, treating them as edible components for a meal planner.
The bot cheerfully created unappealing recipes when customers experimented with non-grocery household items.
Key facts
- What
- Pak'nSave's AI-powered Savey Meal-bot generated hazardous recipes, including a mixture creating chlorine gas, when users input non-food household items.
- Incident date
- Aug 10, 2023
- Who
- Pak'nSave
- Failure mode
- Hallucination
- AI surface
- Chatbot
- Severity
- Catastrophic
What happened
Pak'nSave's Savey Meal-bot AI, designed to help customers use leftovers, produced dangerous recipes when users input household chemicals. The bot suggested mixtures that would create chlorine gas and other toxic combinations. These results occurred when users experimented with non-grocery items.
What broke inside the model
- 01 · TriggerA user asks for a fact, a citation, or a figure.
- 02 · Model stepThe model writes a fluent, confident answer.
- 03 · Control gapNothing ties the claim back to a real source.
- 04 · FailureA fabricated fact ships as if it were verified.
- 05 · ConsequenceThe false claim reaches a customer, a court, or the public.
Confidence holds, and even spikes, as the claim detaches from any source.
The system lacked input validation and safety guardrails to filter out hazardous non-food items. It treated chemical ingredients as standard food inputs, generating structurally plausible but deadly recipes.
What it cost
Sources
- PressSupermarket AI meal planner app suggests recipe that would create chlorine gastheguardian.com
- PressAI-powered grocery bot suggests recipe for toxic gas, “poison bread sandwich”arstechnica.com
- PressNew Zealand supermarket AI meal planner app suggests poisonous recipestrtworld.com
Cite this entry
https://failureindex.ai/failures/pak-nsave-savey-meal-bot-suggestsAI Failure Index. "Pak'nSave Savey Meal-bot suggests recipes using toxic household chemicals" (FI-0214). Realm Labs. https://failureindex.ai/failures/pak-nsave-savey-meal-bot-suggests (indexed Jun 5, 2026).Data fields CC-BY 4.0, prose citation permitted. Incident ID FI-0214. Full dataset at /data.
Note from Realm Labs, the Index steward
How Realm would have caught this
- Prism
- OmniGuard
- AI Detection & Response (AIDR)
A runtime layer that watches the model's internal state can flag the moment a model commits to a claim it has no support for, and hold or reroute the response before it reaches a user. Realm reads those signals in real time rather than grading the transcript after the fact.