Nestlé said a shipment of its KitKat chocolate bars worth an estimated 12 tons, or 413,793 candy bars, was stolen after leaving the company’s production site in Italy and heading for Poland, with the load still unaccounted for as of Friday. The company, based in Vevey, Switzerland, said the vehicle and its cargo “are still nowhere to be found.”
In its statement, Nestlé said the missing shipment disappeared last week while it was en route between production and distribution locations. The bars were manufactured and then transported as part of distribution intended to reach customers throughout Europe.
Nestlé said the stolen bars could potentially make their way into unofficial sales channels across European markets. The company added that the bars can still be traced if they surface, pointing to the unique batch code assigned to individual bars.
KitKat also said that consumers, retailers and wholesalers would be able to identify whether a product is connected to the stolen shipment. The company said the identification process involves scanning the on-pack batch numbers, and that if a match is found, the scanner would provide instructions for how to alert the company with evidence.
“Whilst we appreciate the criminals’ exceptional taste, the fact remains that cargo theft is an escalating issue for businesses of all sizes,” KitKat said in a statement. The company said it went public with its experience in an effort to raise awareness of what it described as an increasingly common criminal trend, adding that “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.”