A TEENAGER from Westbury got more than he bargained for when he bit into a chocolate bar to find a piece of metal embedded in it.

Liam Smith, 18, found the metal inside the ASDA own brand sandwich bar he had taken to work in his lunch box.

Mr Smith's mother, Julie Robinson, had bought the packet of Smartprice bars from ASDA in Trowbridge for Liam, his 20-year-old brother Ashley and half sister, Abigail Brine, five.

It was just luck that the little girl did not get the bar with the spike in it.

Mrs Robinson said: "My little girl has the same chocolate bars and she is only five.

"If she had bitten into that I hate to think what could have happened. She could have choked or cut her lip or tongue or anything."

Mrs Robinson, a teaching assistant at Matravers School, was horrified when Liam got home from his job with Rudmans in Chippenham and told her what had happened.

She said: "I sent him straight to the mirror to look at his teeth. He could have broken his teeth on it."

Abigail's dad, Frankie Brine, said that the metal spike looks as if it came from a piece of machinery used in making the chocolate bars.

He said: "It wasn't a little piece of metal, it was quite big. It was about the size of the pins you get in a watchstrap and it was very sharp. It is just a good job that my daughter didn't eat it."

Staff at ASDA have sent the spike off to their head office and the family are still waiting to hear from the company.

Adrian Bright, customer service manager at ASDA, said: "We take all complaints very seriously and a foreign object in a product we take very, very seriously. We are sending the product back to the suppliers to investigate how this has happened."