The wheel on a powered dispatch cart broke at a freight depot near Hünfeld on Wednesday, sending a trailer of Erfurter Morgenkrume’s festive biscuits towards Fulda instead of Hamburg and Bremen. On Friday, the bakery announced an extra packing shift and 14 temporary jobs after retailers in the receiving area sold thousands of tins in little more than a day.
The 24,000 tins were meant for 68 independent grocery shops in northern Germany. The depot’s dispatch team moved the load after the cart failure, but a trailer assignment was not corrected; Morgenkrume said the retailer shipment was intact and no one was hurt. The company learnt of the wrong delivery when the Fulda wholesaler called on Thursday morning.
Fulda got the Christmas stock
Instead of being hauled back north, the biscuits went to 21 shops around Fulda, a small city in the state of Hesse. Morgenkrume agreed to let the local retailers sell them at the usual €8.90 a tin (about US$10.30), rather than risk damaging the boxes in another long journey. By Thursday evening, 9,300 tins had gone.
Stefanie Bergnaum, a buyer for one of the Fulda-area shops, said customers had begun asking whether the seasonal biscuits would return before the first display was even empty. “People came in for one tin and left carrying three. We’ve never had our Christmas shelf cleared this early,” she said. Several shops have asked the bakery to reserve another batch for them.
An expensive second batch
Morgenkrume chief executive Mieszko Gajewski apologised to the 68 northern shops, whose deliveries will arrive up to four days late. He said some retailers first heard of the delay from a regional radio report on Thursday, before the bakery had contacted them directly. “We should have called our customers before the story reached the air. That was our mistake, not theirs,” he said.
The company expects the detour and rushed replacement production to cost €280,000 (about US$325,000). It will start a second packing shift at its Erfurt bakery on Monday and hire 14 people for six weeks, bringing its seasonal workforce to 42. Gajewski said the extra run would produce 16,000 tins, with the first replacement cases due in Hamburg and Bremen by 22 October.
For Valentin Zangerl, who bought a tin at a Fulda shop on Thursday, the mix-up turned an ordinary grocery stop into a seasonal surprise. “I thought these usually appeared much later,” he said. The bakery said it will not raise the price on the replacement run, even though it must pay for faster freight to the northern shops.
Morgenkrume, a 190-person bakery, said its normal Christmas production schedule would continue alongside the extra shift. The Fulda shops can sell their remaining tins, while the northern retailers will receive newly baked stock; the company said it would send each buyer a dispatch update by email on Friday afternoon.
