A group of Belgian scouts were left embarrassed this week after ordering nearly 3,000 sausages instead of the 290 they had initially hoped for.
For their annual summer camp in Bilzen, province of Limburg, members of the Chiro youth movement had decided to place an order for 290 sausages from the Colruyt website.
However, when they received the delivery they realised there had been a mistake: the group had accidentally ordered ten times the amount of sausages. With a staggering 2,900 sausages, the group was not sure what to do.
"They were packaged in packs of 10, but this was not clearly indicated on the website," explained one of the Chiro camp leaders, Stef Coomans, to VRT on Tuesday.
Between them, they estimated only being able to eat around 400. This still left the scout group with around 2,500 sausages looking to go to waste.
Returning them to the sender was also not an option. "Colruyt would just take them back to throw them away, but that's wasteful. And whatever happens, we have to pay the bill, so we'd rather do something useful with them," said Coomans.
With this in mind, the camp organisers decided to store the meat in a cold room in Kiewit, Hasselt, and then launch an appeal online to sell the remaining bangers.
According to their Facebook, prices were set at €8 per 10 sausages (weighing at 1.5 kg), with a free pack for every ten boxes ordered.
The appeal was launched on the national holiday on Monday and remarkably, it worked. In a few days, all of the leftover sausages had been bought and picked up from the cold storage location in Hasselt.
"Thank you to all the buyers!" said Chiro on social media.
This is also not the first time the group has placed a wrong order: "It is a mistake we have made in the past, but never on such a scale," admitted Coomans.
