Dark chocolate
Happy Sunday {{first_name}},
The vast majority of you are also Ghost Mail readers, so we don’t feel too bad about making a share price reference this early on a Sunday. Lindt has dropped 36% in the past year, a huge move in the opposite direction to the price of the underlying product.
But why?
Dark chocolate
Lindt is struggling, with many of its issues linked to a concentrated cocoa supply chain that has some very difficult socioeconomic elements.
It’s the dark side of chocolate, as told by Dominique Olivier in the way that only she can: by drawing parallels to Roald Dahl.
Read on for a story of stolen KitKats in Europe and a set of Fast Facts themed around wild stories linked to food.
Enjoy the rest of your Sunday!
The Finance Ghost (follow on X) | Dominique Olivier (connect on LinkedIn)
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The sweet, sweet taste of crime
TL;DR: Someone in Europe has 27 tonnes of sweets and a lot of explaining to do.
Earlier this year (on the morning of 17 March, to be exact) a 41-year-old lorry driver parked at a truck stop near Neustadt-Glewe in northern Germany and went about his day. When he came back that evening, his cab was exactly where he’d left it. The trailer behind it, along with the 15 tonnes of fruit gums inside, was not.
Someone had simply unhitched it and driven off with roughly €250,000 worth of sweets, from a truck stop off a major motorway, in the space of a working day. Nobody, it seems, saw a thing. Police appealed for witnesses, presumably anyone who’d noticed a sticky-fingered stranger or a sudden local influx of fruit gums.
Just over a week later, Europe’s sneaky sweet tooth struck again. A truck carrying 413,793 KitKats left a Nestlé factory in central Italy, bound for Poland, but it never arrived. And these weren’t just any KitKats. They were a new limited edition shaped like Formula 1 racing cars. As getaway vehicles go, that’s hard to beat.
Nestlé, to its credit, saw the funny side. For decades it has told us to have a break with KitKat. As the company pointed out, the thieves had simply taken the message too literally. It also reassured customers that supply wasn’t affected, which was presumably cold comfort to whoever in Poland was expecting 413,793 of them.
Then it got practical. Every bar carried a traceable batch code, so KitKat launched an online Stolen KitKat Tracker, inviting the public to check their snacks for contraband. It must be one of the few criminal investigations where the evidence tends to get eaten before it can be reported.
There was one small snag to KitKat’s tracker plan: it launched on the 1st of April. KitKat had to clarify, with what I can only imagine was a weary sigh, that this was not an April Fool’s joke. Someone really had stolen 12 tonnes of its chocolate, and it really would like it back.
As far as anyone has reported, neither the gummies nor the chocolate racing cars have been found. So if you’re offered a suspiciously cheap KitKat, check the wrapper. If it’s shaped like a racing car, you may want to call the police before you call dibs.
Dominique’s Fast Facts
Inspired by the chaos caused by what we eat, this week’s Fast Facts section is titled: "Don’t play with your food”.
Between August 2011 and July 2012, thieves made off with 2,700 tonnes of maple syrup, worth about C$18 million, from a warehouse in Saint-Louis-de-Blandford, Quebec. It belonged to the Federation of Quebec Maple Syrup Producers, which keeps a strategic maple syrup reserve (yes, really). The thieves took barrels away, siphoned out the syrup, refilled them with water and put them back. It came to light during a routine inventory check, when some barrels were found to be full of water and others had started to rust (maple syrup doesn’t rust). The ringleader, Richard Vallières, got eight years and a C$9.4 million fine.
In Emilia-Romagna, you can borrow money against cheese. For decades, the Italian bank Credem has accepted wheels of Parmigiano Reggiano as loan collateral, giving producers cash while their cheese matures (sometimes two years or more). It keeps around 500,000 wheels in its warehouses, stacked 20 high, where staff check them daily for cracks, swelling and damp. Isn’t that the most Italian thing ever?
When margarine reached America in the 1870s, the dairy industry did not take it well. Some states banned it outright, and by 1898 more than 30 had banned colouring it yellow like butter. Vermont went further: from 1884, margarine had to be dyed pink, and New Hampshire and a few others followed. The US Supreme Court struck down the pink laws in 1898, noting that pink was not margarine’s natural colour. Wisconsin held out longest, keeping yellow margarine illegal until 1967.
In 1986, Californian carrot farmer Mike Yurosek was watching up to 400 tons of carrots a day get thrown out at his Bakersfield packing plant for being too bent, broken or ugly to sell. Animal feed only went so far (feed a cow enough carrots, he said, and its fat turns orange). So he bought an industrial green-bean cutter from a frozen-food company that was going out of business. It happened to cut things into 5 centimetre pieces, which is still the standard size of a “baby” carrot. He sent a batch to a customer, who called the next day to say they only wanted those. The rest, as they say, is history.