- Nadine Youssef
- BBC News – Toronto
Crystal Rigger Westergaard specializes in reviving the popular confectionery of the past
What am I going to do with about 133,000 chocolate bars? A Canadian woman asked herself this question after her candy company made lots of delicious treats that were about to expire in June. This dilemma made headlines there before it had a happy ending.
Mrs. Krystal Rigger Westergaard is dedicated to reviving the old folk confectionery.
A full-time physiotherapist, Krystal started her own company, Canadian Candy Nostalgia, in 2018 to reinvigorate the Cuban Lunch, which is actually an old World War II dessert that was dear to her mother. .
Two years ago, the Canadian woman worked to revive another discontinued chocolate bar: Rum & Butter, a non-alcoholic Cadbury chocolate with a rum-flavored gummy center, which was popular in the 1980s but is no longer in use. in 1996.
Her revival was a huge hit and brought immediate results. Her company sold over a million chocolate bars after the first round of manufacturing, and her company was eager to make more.
However, a series of mishaps related to the outbreak of the Covid pandemic led to a catastrophic overproduction, and I manufactured 333 thousand panels in one day in June 2022. This means that all these products will expire after exactly a year and a day.
Some might think that it would be easy to drain that amount of chocolate fairly quickly, but the overproduction of these sweets revealed that Mrs. Crystal Westergaard was in a big dilemma.
While Canada does not have regulations requiring expiration dates on chocolate, Crystal told the BBC that grocery stores “stopped taking orders in January” because the “preferred good” date was fast approaching.
That means the company now has an overproduction of about 133,000 unsold candy bars, or about 5,540 boxes of chocolate, stored at a secure food depot in Calgary, Alberta, a three-hour drive from Crystal Westergaard’s home in Camrose.
This means that it cannot exploit this amount and distribute chocolate bars, for example, to its neighbors. Nor could it send orders of just one box, since the boxes were stored together in pallets of candy that weighed about 1,000 pounds (453.5 kilograms) each.
I also learned that the Calgary Food Bank has a “no dessert” policy, so going to the food bank wasn’t an option either.
Eventually Crystal resigned herself to the fact that she needed to give away these candy bars for free, and she had to quickly come up with a plan.
“I became increasingly aware that if I left the chocolate there, it would reach its expiration date and we would have to throw it away,” she said. “That was the worst case scenario for me.”
So I did what most people do nowadays when they have a problem: ask the internet for help.
She did post her problem online, and her story caught the attention of a journalist in the Globe and Mail, who wrote about the mystery of Ms. Reger Westergaard on 10 April. Soon after, she received tons of emails from people all over the world, asking if they could get a special box of chocolates.
But the chocolatier wanted to focus on distributing the boxes in bulk to nearby organizations that could pick them up.
Thanks to the great publicity, these chocolate bars have already been distributed to homes in various places in need.
These include a local Ukrainian church helping newly arrived refugees, a reception center for homeless people in Calgary, and even chocolates sent to the fire department in neighboring Saskatchewan.
Calgary-area food banks have also reached out to get some of the boxes of chocolates despite their no-candy policy, and a local charity uses and sells the chocolates to raise money to send poor children to camps.
All the remaining candy is now being dealt with, Crystal Westergaard assured, and she couldn’t be more relieved with this sweet ending.
“I’m glad there’s a follow-up going,” she told the BBC. She still gets daily messages from people all over North America asking if she has any chocolate left.
