At around 11 p.m. on Christmas Eve, four suspects broke into a warehouse in Trenton, Ontario to steal a shipment of butter valued at $ 200,000.
The thieves, arriving in a black SUV, left with two trucks and their trailers, loaded with 40 tons of butter, the National Post reported on Friday.
The trailers were found empty, nearly two hours’ drive from the scene of the crime.
Each of them contained 20,000 kilograms of butter, which police said was worth about $ 200,000.
Thefts in the food industry are much more frequent than we thought, according to Sylvain Charlebois, director of the Agri-Food Analysis Laboratory at Dalhousie University. It’s relatively easy, he explained, to resell stolen food to restaurateurs or catering companies who might not ask too many questions if the price is right.
This story is reminiscent of “the maple syrup theft of the century”, when between 2011 and 2012, 3,000 tonnes of maple syrup worth $ 18.7 million were stolen from a storage site in Quebec.
Reports from the early to mid-1900s suggest that the theft of butter was a fairly common crime, along with the theft and resale of other products, such as potatoes.