Alberta woman gives away 133,000 Rum & Butter bars in a 'whirlwind' of charity
CBC
Crystal Regehr Westergard has made a lot of people very happy with her 133,000 Rum & Butter chocolate bars.
The Camrose, Alta., founder of Canadian Candy Nostalgia recently found herself in a pickle when pandemic delays left her with an unwieldy surplus of the classic confectioneries — all with a best before date in June.
But a few news stories and many, many emails later, Westergard has given away all her extra treats to a host of Canadian charities, food banks, churches and volunteer organizations.
It feels good to do good, she said — but she hopes it never comes to this again.
"I think I'll look back on it and say I'm glad I did it," Westergard said. "But when you're in the typhoon whirlwind, it's a lot. Yeah, it's a lot."
WATCH: Canadian company's chocolate bar backlog:
It's also been a lot of work for Rena Pilon, but she's more than happy to do it.
Pilon is the communications and safety officer for the Bradwell Volunteer Fire Department in Saskatchewan, which took 16,000 of the Rum & Butter bars off Westergard's hands.
The volunteer firefighters, who service communities in and around the Rural Municipality of Blucher, Sask., are planning to sell the bars to raise money for much-needed new equipment.
"We're very proud of our small little department, and all our volunteers are excited to get out there and try to sell some of these candy bars," Pilon said.
The shipments — 1.5 pallets of bars weighing about 770 kilograms — arrived to much fanfare on Thursday, with free delivery courtesy of Purolator.
"When we read about Canadian Candy Nostalgia's creative call-out to give their chocolate bars away instead of letting them go to waste, we knew we could help," Purolator spokesperson Courtney Reistetter said in an email.
"The chocolate bars will be put to good use by the fire department in their fundraising efforts, making it a win-win all around."
It took a lot of co-ordination to make it happen, Pilon said, but she's grateful to anyone involved.
The United States is telling its citizens to leave Iran, as Washington maintains its pressure on Tehran to cease its crackdown on protesters and U.S. President Donald Trump threatens to strike the Iranian government over the issue.
U.S. President Donald Trump said the United States may meet Iranian officials and was in contact with the opposition as he weighed a range of strong responses, including military options, to a violent crackdown on Iranian protests, which pose one of the biggest challenges to clerical rule since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
A crackdown on nationwide protests in Iran has killed at least 538 people and even more are feared dead, activists said Sunday, while Tehran warned that the U.S. military and Israel would be "legitimate targets" if America uses force to protect demonstrators.
For years, many of Venezuela’s exiles in Spain — leading opposition figures and citizens — have hoped for a day when ousted president Nicolás Maduro would no longer be in power.
The U.S. attack on Venezuela has shifted the ground for guerrilla groups operating across the country's borderlands with Colombia, raising fears of possible betrayal by Venezuelan regime officials, while opening the door to a wider conflict should U.S. boots ever hit the ground, local security experts say.
Protests sweeping across Iran neared the two-week mark on Saturday, with the country’s government acknowledging the ongoing demonstrations despite an intensifying crackdown and as the Islamic Republic remains cut off from the rest of the world.
Russia didn’t just use a hypersonic missile to target a site in western Ukraine near the border with Poland, in the European Union, but high ranking officials then went on to boast about the power of the nuclear-capable weapon, in what some saw as a clear warning to the West.
The official White House narrative of how a U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement (ICE) officer shot and killed a U.S. citizen in her vehicle in Minneapolis is bumping hard up against what can be seen in videos of the incident.
A U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent shot and killed a Minneapolis motorist on Wednesday during the Trump administration's latest immigration crackdown on a major American city — a shooting that federal officials claimed was an act of self-defence but that the city's mayor described as "reckless" and unnecessary.
When Marco Rubio took the lectern at Mar-a-Lago shortly after U.S. President Donald Trump announced the country had captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, it was the culmination of a decade of effort from the secretary of state and a clear sign that he had emerged as a leading voice within the Trump administration.
The catchphrase going into Tuesday's coalition of the willing meeting on Ukraine in Paris appears to be: expect the unexpected.
Deposed Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro pleaded not guilty on terrorism and drug-trafficking charges during his first appearance in a New York court on Monday.
The leaders of Denmark and Greenland on Sunday urged U.S. President Donald Trump to stop threatening to take over Greenland, after he reiterated his wish to do so in an interview with The Atlantic magazine.