Woolworths pizza sauce turns into 'rocket' leaving disastrous trail across family home

An Aussie mum has woken up to find her home splattered with red liquid across the walls and ceiling. The culprit was far less sinister than one may think though — a bottle of Woolworths Pizza Sauce.

Caitlin-Rose Wilkinson woke up on Sunday to find streaks of the sauce covering her Perth home's kitchen and living space, with lines of it seemingly drawing a map onto her white walls.

The mess from the sauce bottle "spontaneously combusting" was so bad Wilkinson ended up hiring a professional cleaner to help clean up the mess, though there is now a permanent mark that will require paint to fix. "Unfortunately the ceiling was too far gone so there is still a mark on the ceiling and we're going to have to repaint," she said.

While she is not exactly sure how it happened, Wilkinson believes that because she accidentally left her sauce container out on the counter overnight instead of putting it in the fridge, it fermented and the gases caused it to explode.

She said based on the splatters it looked like the force of it sent the bottle across the room from the kitchen counter, bouncing onto the sink, then from the sink onto the floor where she says it was a "rocket ship" and launched upwards, through the light fixture and into the hallway.

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What really caused the explosion?

It is hard to say for sure in this instance with just the video alone, though Rutgers University food chemist Thomas Hartman previously said "when you get expansion and containers blowing up, a lot of the time it's from gas build-up within the container, and that's usually a red flag for microbial growth."

When the seal of a sauce — like ketchup or pizza sauce — is opened, microbes can move in and start building pressure inside the bottle as they convert carbohydrates, leading to the production of gas in a process called fermentation.

This is why Woolworths advise people to refrigerate their pizza sauce once it has been opened, as refrigeration helps slow down the growth of the microbes.

Others share similar explosion incidents

Many people surprisingly responded to Wilkinson with similar stories of household explosions. "Similar experience with homemade wine. Woke up to a pink (originally white) and traumatised cat, and my kitchen looked like a murder scene," one said.

"My sister did an insurance claim for when a similar thing happened with a 2-litre juice she had in her pantry. They covered the costs of her cleaners and repainting her ceilings," another claimed.

"This happened to me and ketchup in the pantry... the mess was contained but it was still a MESS," a third shared.

As well as these instances, in 2019, the popular Sriracha Hot Chilli Sauce was recalled due to fears of bottles exploding as a result of a lactic acid buildup from fermentation.

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