Swiss food giant Nestlé said on Saturday that roughly 12 tonnes of KitKat chocolate was taken in a theft last week. The company said a truck carrying 413,793 bars from its new chocolate range left a production site in central Italy en route to Poland and subsequently disappeared. Nestlé did not reveal the precise location where the vehicle went missing, and as of Saturday afternoon both the truck and its cargo remained unlocated.
A Nestlé brand spokesperson noted the irony of the theft given the product’s “have a break” slogan, saying the thieves had taken the message “a little too literally.” The company warned the loss could lead to shortages of the wafer-covered bars on supermarket shelves in some European markets and cautioned that the missing bars might turn up in unofficial or black-market sales channels.
Nestlé said it can track the stolen stock: each bar carries a unique batch code that can be scanned to check whether a bar matches the missing shipment. If a match is found, the scanner would receive instructions on how to alert KitKat, and the company would follow up and share evidence as appropriate.
Nestlé also used the incident to highlight a broader rise in cargo theft, saying such crimes are becoming more sophisticated and affect businesses of all sizes. The company said it went public with details of the theft to raise awareness of the increasing problem.
Edited by: Darko Janjevic