Behind Bars: 5 of the Top Chocolate Heists in Europe

While some thieves specialize in stealing jewelry or robbing banks, apparently quite a few set their sights on something none of us can resist, chocolate. It seems more likely they would sell it than eat it, especially when it is stolen from a fridge….

Chocolate Stolen at Work

We've all been there. Sharing a fridge, at work or at home, and the expensive treat you've been saving mysteriously disappears. Which of your housemates or work colleagues is the light-fingered one? In the case of the theft from the fridge of The Sunday Times newspaper in London in April 2023, though, the thief would be dark-fingered. Someone helped themselves to some chocolate. Not any old chocolate, however.

An irate email went round to the newspaper's staff explaining that someone had pilfered samples of 'the world's most expensive chocolate', which were needed for a story. Whether the staff member with the sweet tooth ever returned the chocolate, or merely licked their lips and kept their head down, is not known.

In terms of chocolate thefts this is small-scale stuff. Thieves around the world have stolen - or attempted to steal - chocolate worth millions of dollars, from lone wolf thieves through to the Mafia themselves.

Eggcellent Taste

In England, Joby Pool is the example of the lone wolf thief with his eye on a very specific target: Cadbury Creme Eggs. In February 2023 Pool broke into a storage unit on an industrial estate in the town of Telford, using a metal grinder to open a chain lock. He then located his targeted trailer, which carried 200,000 creme eggs and other chocolate items.

Pool had arrived with a stolen tractor, which he attached to the trailer and then drove off with over $38,000 of chocolate in tow. Police were soon alerted, however, and began to follow the tractor and trailer along the nearest motorway. Realizing the game was up, Pool - who had a series of convictions for handling stolen goods - pulled over and literally came out with his hands up. He was recently sentenced to 18 months in jail.

Similar to the Easter Creme Egg is the Kinder Surprise Egg. These originated from an Italian Easter tradition whereby children were given chocolate eggs that had, well, a surprise in them. Kinder Eggs are popular around the world, with over 30 billion sold since their creation in 1974, except in the USA where they are banned for safety reasons. Clearly they are deemed more of a health risk than an AK-47.

In August 2017, thieves in the town of Neustadt in Germany helped themselves to a refrigerated trailer filled with Kinder Eggs along with jars of the chocolate spread Nutella, and other confectionery. In all there were 20 tons of items stolen, worth an estimated $82,000. The thieves seem to have got away with it, and it's nice to try to imagine their delight at ripping open the Kinder Eggs to see what surprises were waiting inside.

German thieves obviously like to target the sweet stuff as five months later there was an even bigger chocolate robbery. In the city of Freiberg in southwest Germany, close to the French border, at least two thieves made off with two truck-trailers piled high with 48.5 US tons of chocolate. That's a lot of chocolate, and the haul was worth almost half a million dollars.

The two thieves headed for different towns on the French border. One ran away at a rest area before the border when he thought he'd been spotted, leaving behind a truck still full of chocolate. The other truck was found at another border crossing, but the thief and two-thirds of the haul had gone. It still wasn't a bad pay-day, as the thieves were never found.

Bilking Milka

Police in Austria confirmed that chocolate heists were on the increase after 20 tons of Milka chocolate products were stolen from a factory there in November 2019. Surprisingly the chocolate was headed for Belgium, a country you'd have thought would be the last to need to import chocolate. The company hired a Czech trucking company to make the delivery, so it wasn't surprising when a Czech driver turned up to collect the goods. Unfortunately for Milka, it wasn't the real driver. This one had forged documents and drove off into the night with $55,000 worth of chocolate. Safe to say that if it ever went on sale in Belgium, it wasn't by legitimate means.

That, however, is a mere candy bar compared to the biggest chocolate ring of all time, which is said to have netted a cool $8 million worth of Swiss chocolate over the course of 2014, amounting to 287 tons. The people responsible were the 'Ndrangheta Mafia family from Calabria in southern Italy. They decided to diversify from drugs and guns and went into other stolen lines, including flowers and chocolate.

An Italian Chocolate Stash

The Swiss chocolatiers, Lindt & Sprüngli, kept quiet about the robberies until police in Naples found $1.7 million's worth of Lindor chocolates in a Naples warehouse. They asked Lindt if, by chance, they had lost any chocolate, and Lindt admitted that almost 300 tons had gone missing over the year. The police arrested and charged 48 gang members, who no doubt wish they had stuck to what they knew: guns and drugs. It's one of the few chocolate thefts that resulted in arrests, however, so Willy Wonka beware.