2 min read- Nestlé says 413,793 Kit Kats, or about 12 tons of candy, were stolen during transit from Italy to Poland.
- The truck and its contents are still missing, and the company has not said exactly where the shipment disappeared.
- Nestlé says the stolen bars may appear through unofficial sales channels, but they can be traced using batch codes.
Somewhere in Europe right now, there is an absolutely unholy amount of missing Kit Kats.
Nestlé says roughly 12 tons of the candy bars, or 413,793 individual Kit Kats, were stolen after they left a production site in central Italy and headed toward Poland. The shipment was supposed to proceed to distribution across Europe, but it vanished, and the truck is still missing.
That is not a typo, by the way. Not 413. Not 4,000. More than 400,000 Kit Kats. At that point, we are no longer talking about a little Easter Bunny-related mischief. We are talking about a full-scale chocolate operation.
Nestlé says there is no safety risk associated with the missing bars, but the company did warn that the stolen products could end up appearing through unofficial sales channels in Europe. The good news, if you can call it that, is that the bars can apparently be tracked through their batch codes. The company says anyone who scans a matching code will get instructions on how to report it.
“We’ve always encouraged people to have a break with KITKAT—but it seems thieves have taken the message too literally and made a break with more than 12 tonnes of our chocolate,” a KITKAT spokesperson said. “Whilst we appreciate the criminals’ exceptional taste, the fact remains that cargo theft is an escalating issue for businesses of all sizes. With more sophisticated schemes being deployed on a regular basis, we have chosen to go public with our own experience in the hope that it raises awareness of an increasingly common criminal trend.”
The company has not said exactly where the truck disappeared, only that it left Italy and never made it to where it was supposed to go in Poland. As of the latest reports, neither the vehicle nor the candy has been recovered.
This does not appear to be an Easter chocolate emergency for the rest of us, just a very expensive one for Nestlé.