How do you give away 133,000 chocolate bars?

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Jordan Heath-Rawlings They are two of the best words in the entire English language, and they go even better together. Free chocolate. Sounds great, right? You want some, you can actually have it totally free, I promise. There’s a catch though, actually a couple of catches. First, you’ve gotta go pick it up yourself, and that means that you have to get to Calgary, which is not that bad a deal if you live relatively close and you have a means of transportation. But here’s the real catch. You can’t have a free chocolate bar or two or three chocolate bars or a box of chocolate bars. If you want some free chocolate, you have to take 11,000 chocolate bars. That’s just the starting point. It would be great if you could take more than that, but 11,000 will do so. Yes. If you have a truck and a big appetite, or some people who need some chocolate and you want to go get them, they’re all. We’ll tell you how today it’s not perhaps as easy as you might think. In fact, this is a story about how difficult it is to give away more than a hundred thousand bars of chocolate. I am Jordan Heath-Rawlings. This is the big story. Jan Pruden is a feature writer for The Globe and Male based in Edmonton. She reported on this story based in Calgary.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Jan, this is a really fun one.

Jan Pruden It is. Yeah. Not my usual beat, that’s for sure. I know it’s, well, it’s Friday, it’s springtime, and, uh, everybody likes free chocolate.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Isn’t that the truth?

Jan Pruden I, I had no idea how much until I wrote this story.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Okay. Where did you find the story?

Jan Pruden Well, it’s a funny thing I had. I guess a Facebook friended, Crystal Regehr Westergard, who’s the chocolate maven at the heart of this story years ago, because she had brought back this bar called The Cuban Lunch, and I just thought, oh, that’s an interesting story. That’ll be a quirky story one day. So I asked to be her friend on Facebook and I was one of 161 of her friends. And so last week I was actually working on another story and I sort of took a break and looked at Facebook and I just happened to see, right as I was looking at Facebook, Crystal’s post to her 160 Facebook friends, including me, and it said, does anyone know what to do with a lot of chocolate? Like thousands of bars of chocolate? And um, there was a picture of a bunch of boxes. And so I messaged her and said, Hi, I’m a reporter at The Globe Mail and well, sounds like there’s something interesting here. And as soon as she told me the situation, I realized it was, uh, a lot more chocolate than I imagined. And also that it would be a really great story.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Um, it certainly is. Why don’t we start at the beginning. Who is Crystal? You called her a chocolate maven. How did she get in the biz.

Jan Pruden Yeah, so Crystal’s a physiotherapist in Alberta, an hour and a bit outside of Edmonton, and when her mother was in a care home and having a difficult time in her life, and Crystal told me that she was looking for ways to delight her mother and to bring her mother joy as she started running out of ideas on how to do that. She got her mother some of her favorite chocolate bars from when she was young and her mother used to love the Cuban lunch. And so Crystal went looking for Cuban lunches and realized that they did not make them anymore. And that sent Crystal on this journey to make Cuban lunches for her mother. And in the process she discovered, you could essentially revive a dead chocolate bar and that companies, as she told me, corporations sometimes will just discontinue a product. Doesn’t matter how many people love it or even how many are, buy, are buying it, sometimes if it suits them to discontinue it, they will. So she recreated the Cuban lunch. She obtained the trademark for the packaging. She found a company to, uh, recreate it. She was on Dragons Den.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Hmm.

Jan Pruden That’s how she entered the world of chocolate, while also working still full-time and taking clients as a physiotherapist.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Wow. And so the Cuban lunch was the first, uh, chocolate bar created by her company, which I guess is called Canadian Candy Nostalgia. Yes. What was the next one? I want you to tell me about the rum and butter specifically. What’s it like?

Jan Pruden Yeah, so the rum and butter was the next chocolate bar, and she told me that her husband had been such a good sport. Her, essentially getting them involved in starting a, you know, side hustle as a chocolate bar company that she wanted to recreate his favorite chocolate bar from childhood. And it was the rum and butter.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings And what is the rum and butter? I don’t even, uh, remember it, to be honest. Maybe I’m, I’m too young though. I, it feels like I can never say that anymore.

Jan Pruden So the rum and butter was very popular in the seventies and eighties. That was a really popular flavour combination at the time. It went out of production in the nineties. It is like a caramel milk bar in that it has little squares that have this gooey filling inside of it, but it is a rum and buttered flavour filling. So I think I described it. A caramel bar.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings If a caramel milk bar had a mustache and was hanging out listening to the Cuban music?

Jan Pruden It’s kind of like, you know, a caramel bar. Cooler in the seventies and eighties kind of way. And so they decided to make this one, uh, for her husband.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings What kinds of problems did they face, you know, getting it produced and getting it to market? And then how did those problems resolve, like really quickly?

Jan Pruden Yeah. So, um, they found a company to manufacture them. You know, they’re not an independent chocolate maker that makes the chocolate themselves, right. They contract food production facilities to, as a lot of independent food businesses do. So they found a manufacturer and they launched the bar in 2021 and, uh, they were selling really well. They were doing really well. But then, as you’ll probably remember, even into 2022, the pandemic was causing a supply chain issues.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Mm-hmm.

Jan Pruden And manufacturing issues as sometimes people were having trouble finding staff or large numbers of staff were out sick. And so their factory that was manufacturing them, uh, didn’t have enough workers, was struggling to produce the bars, and then got up to speed. And what happened was they produced essentially two truckloads of bars way too quickly. And so they ended up, an extra truckload of bars. Now, in Canada, chocolate does not require a best before date, but Crystal told me that grocery stores and retailers really want a best before date, right? And cuz they know how long something has sat on the shelf and some consumers really want them. So, uh, these extra bars were produced. Two close together and they have an expiry date of June. So at first they were just trying to sell the extra bars, doing some two for one deals, trying to move them. But as the time started ticking closer to June, she realized that they had to move them. Even though the bars will be completely edible, will be totally fine. They’ll probably have a shelf life of, you know, who knows? They could last for years. Certainly maybe decades, but for, for stores and for some consumers that’s like, you know, a ticking time bomb, right?

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Right.

Jan Pruden Running towards expiry. So she knew that they would become harder to get rid of and that she had to move them. And hence a Facebook post, uh, looking for help moving what turned out to be 133,000 RU butter bars.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Can you give us a sense of exactly, I know this sounds like a dumb question, but how many, uh, rum butter bars that really is, and like what that actually looks like and the process of even trying to give that away?

Jan Pruden Yeah. You know, I think it’s, it’s one of those things that people right away are like, oh, give them to the food bank. Yeah. Or you know, oh, just hand them out on the street, which sound like wonderful ideas until you actually think. What’s involved in that? I did some, some math to try to express how many chocolate bars 177,000 chocolate bars is. They would stretch for 17 straight kilometers, and they’re a pretty short little bar. Actually, I bought one and measured one from the store. You know, that would be as Crystal figured out. One for every seven people in a city like Calgary, I did math on how you could give one to every person in Red Deer, one to every person at a sold out Oilers playoff game. I think, uh, one to every person on six Westjet flights, and you would still have a lot left over. I mean, it’s an unbelievable amount of chocolate to get rid of and there’s lots of practicalities to consider. So for instance, oh, just give them to the food bank. One food bank is not gonna accept 177,000 chocolate bars that expire in June. Right? Oh, just give them to one person in Canada. Well, who’s gonna do that? Right? And one thing, Crystal is happy to accept the loss to donate the bars. Um, she just really wants them to be eaten and enjoyed, but she doesn’t wanna be in a situation where it’s gonna cost her. Thousands of dollars more to get rid of them.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Right.

Jan Pruden I mean, that would be sort of the worst case scenario. Yeah. For them ending up in the dump, which is another possibility. So, oh, and another complication that I should add. It’s really a minimum of 11,000. That’s a pallet. Yes. The chocolate bars are stored in a food safe warehouse, a very large food safe warehouse. Gordon Foods in Calgary. So to go inside people, they go with an employee, everything’s food safe. They can’t just start breaking up boxes and having pallets of bars in this facility. So for instance, another common but largely unhelpful reaction is, oh, I’ll take a box.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Hmm

Jan Pruden Um, I’ll take two boxes. But you know, you can’t go to Gordon Foods, have an employee come meet you, get all suited up in food safe material, go inside the warehouse. And leave with, you know, eight chocolate bars in a box. Right? They can’t accompany a million people doing that. And it also wouldn’t be sort of food safe or appropriate to just dump them all in the parking lot, right. So, right. Yeah, it’s complicated. It’s really complicated. It’s more complicated than anyone would’ve thought, uh, from a Facebook post. So 11,000 bars is the minimum.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings What has she done to try to get rid of them? You mentioned food bank. Where else do you even look with this?

Jan Pruden You know, I think one of the problems is, and how Crystal ended up in this situation is that she’s an independent business, her and her husband, she is a full-time physiotherapist. Even when we. When we connected and I started to interview her over the phone, you know, she had to leave to go help a patient who had an issue with their ribs. Right. She went and did a treatment and then came back to the phone and called me. Um, so she’s extremely busy and running a, an independent business, I think you are like a little, you know, David and Goliath with the grocery store chains, with distributors.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Mm-hmm.

Jan Pruden It’s really complicated and because of the amount of time she found herself in a situation where, Her and her staff didn’t have the luxury to spend. Days looking into each possibility that might or might not work, right? Sure. Because at some point, again, that’s kind of throwing, throwing good money after bad is Crystal gonna take a whole week and see, okay, will every school in Calgary take a pallet of bars and who’s gonna get them there? Last I spoken to her, she hadn’t really, she didn’t really have any plans that would work. And then the story came out. So I think the situation may have changed.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Right. And time is ticking. And as I mentioned in the intro, um, if you want the free chocolate, you gotta be able to take 11,000 at minimum. You gotta be able to get them in Calgary. And I guess once your story was published, some people thought they might be able to do it. What, tell me about the response.

Jan Pruden There’s a huge response, huge response. Free chocolate works. In fact, crystal texted me yesterday and said, why are people so freakishly interested in this story? But huge, huge response. And my email being on the bottom of the story, I personally have gotten at last count over 150 emails. My inbox is literally just like lines of emails that say rum and butter. Oh, right. Some, some very, very good ideas or some people who can actually make things happen. And then some that I would say are a little less thought through. You know, companies have reached out later reached out and said that they would ship to food banks for free if that’s what she wanted to do. Some organizations reached out the Edmonton Elks football team, someone from their organization reached out and said they would take 50,000, give ’em away at a football game.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings That’s a good.

Jan Pruden Yeah, and I was laughing. There was an email that I got, um, just before we started recording. That’s from someone that says, I would gladly take them. They’re one of my favorite bars next to caramel milk bars. Let me know. Just let me know. Send me a few. I, and I got that and I thought. Hmm, I’m not sure this person’s fully grasping how many chocolate bars? 133,000 chocolate bars are.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Listen. That’s what my daughter would do if I told her about this story. Just, oh, she’s, she’s five. Listen, I’m gonna throw you under the bus too. It’s jprudent@globemail.com. Can I do that?

Jan Pruden Yeah. Just, um, fled me with your rum and butter ideas. Somebody’s gotta get rid of these bars.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Um, how is Crystal feeling about it now? Uh, that the story’s out there and the responses are coming in. Is she confident? Like, I know we’re talking now, it’s April 13th. Time is ticking.

Jan Pruden Yeah, I mean, uh, so I haven’t spoken to her except for a couple of texts, but the story has gotten picked up all over the place. Um, you know, CBC National did it, as it happens, picked it up. I know Global News did it. It’s really been around. Um, So I feel confident that there is a solution even from my inbox. Uh, you know, some that I said, as I mentioned, are a little bit less doable, but there are many ideas that I think have serious legs and so I personally, I’m gonna check in with her next week, but I feel very confidently that she will have found a place for those chocolate bars. The world demands resolution on this story. So I think you have to, uh, you have to follow it up.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Jan, um, what’s next for Canadian candy nostalgia? Are they gonna keep going or is this kind of like, well, this was a headache, so maybe not?

Jan Pruden You know, that’s a really good question. I didn’t ask her if she has a chocolate bar, another chocolate bar in the works. But you know, if someone out there has a chocolate bar that they love that isn’t manufactured, maybe you should send that to Crystal too. She is, uh, seems open to trying things and really, uh, a really fun person. You know, I have to say, I usually report on less happy news. I’m

Jordan Heath-Rawlings mm-hmm.

Jan Pruden You know, sort of the misery beat reporter. It’s usually bad news when I show up, but luckily her business is gonna survive it. It wasn’t something that was gonna put them out of business, and she’s just such a joyous, lighthearted person. You know, I think the, her motivation for making Cuban lunches is so pure and lovely to delight her mother, and the reason that she was so upset about giving away or having to get rid of the rum and butter bars was not the financial loss. She was prepared to do that, but. I think it, she loves to make people happy with chocolate.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Mm-hmm.

Jan Pruden And she wants people to eat these bars and enjoy them. And so I think even people that may not get a free rub and butter bar, honestly I think they’re a great independent business to support. And she did not pay me off with chocolate to say that I have did not accept any free chocolate myself. She doesn’t have to pay you off. She can’t give it away. It’s true. I’m a Cuban lunch girl. I really do enjoy a Cuban lunch. That’s a great bar. But, um, just really, you know, nice people and I know she wanted those, these bars to go to people who will enjoy them and eat them. And so hopefully this story will have a good sweet ending as well.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Yes. Um, I really want to try a rum and butter bar now cuz I’ve never had one and it sounds delicious. And Jenna, this was such a nice story to end the week with. Um, I’m glad you got to report on something. Happy. I’m glad we did too. Thank you so much. Yeah, thank you. Thanks for having me on.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Jan Pruden writing in the Globe and Mail where we all eagerly await a follow up. That was the big story. I hope you had as much fun listening as we did recording this episode. You can find more though perhaps. None quite so whimsical as this one at the Big Story podcast.ca. You can talk to us on Twitter at the big story fpn. You can always send us an email. Remember email Jan, not us for the free chocolate. You can send emails that are for us about podcasts to hello at the big story podcast.ca. If you like episodes like this, we’d love to hear from you. Especially if you wanna do it in a public forum, like say Apple Podcasts or places that let you leave an epic review, but you don’t have to as long as you download. That’s fine by me. Thanks for listening. I’m Jordan Heath Th Rawlings. Have a wonderful weekend and we’ll talk Monday.