The Great KitKat Heist Has Turned Into a Sweet PR Victory for Nestlé

While 413,793 missing candy bars will surely come with a business cost, they could pay for themselves in goodwill for the Swiss food giant.

Credit: rosinka79/Adobe Stock

During the week of March 23, a truck carrying Nestlé’s new Formula One-themed KitKat bars was making its way from picturesque central Italy to its intended destination of Poland.

Somewhere along the way, the truck was intercepted and approximately 12 tons of the bars—or more than 413,793 KitKats—were stolen. The whereabouts of both the bars and the truck are still unknown.

Despite all odds, this is shaping up to be a huge win for Nestlé.

The Swiss food giant confirmed the chocolate heist to The Athletic on March 28, explaining that the bars in the truck were part of KitKat’s first season as F1’s official chocolate partner.

How Anthropic's Claude AI Became a Co-Founder

No one was hurt in the process, the company said, and the stolen product is not considered to be a risk, since each bar can be tracked with a unique product code. The theft comes just a week before Easter, an important time of year for Nestlé, when shoppers are guaranteed to be loading up their grocery carts with sweets.

It’s not the first heist to have captured international headlines recently.

Last year, the world watched as a much more costly heist (of the actual crown jewels) became a PR crisis for the famed Louvre Museum in Paris, drawing global attention to the museum’s security holes and yearslong infrastructure problems.

© Inc.com