MONTMARTRE, Sask. — How do you keep a cat in the bag for eight months?
Ask Dale Brenner. He’s been on the difficult mission to not let the KitKat out of the bag since September.
When the Eiffel Tower in Montmartre was chosen to be one of only six Canadian attractions featured on a special edition KitKat bar, the Village of Montmartre administrator was the sole official in his community to know. He was immediately sworn to secrecy in the form of a non-disclosure agreement.
“I was excited, but then I got this big document with all kinds of clauses and I started to wonder if this was legitimate, or if it was even something we should do,” said Brenner, who has been Montmartre’s administrator for 28 years.
Brenner normally would have brought the matter before mayor and council, but he had to keep it under wraps. Even his wife and three children could not be informed about it.
The ad agency that created the “Road Trip Breaks” promotion for Nestlé advised Brenner to talk to one of the only people he could — another administrator who had been sworn to secrecy. A conversation with the Drumheller, Alta., official convinced Brenner to sign the deal to put Montmartre’s Eiffel Tower on a KitKat bar.
“After a 15-minute talk, I felt much better about it as they are so much bigger than us and had dealt with things of this scope before,” said Brenner, adding that Drumheller jumped at the chance to have one of their dinosaurs on a KitKat.
The long-time administrator signed all Nestlé agreements that came his way, including a release agreement for a photo he was instructed to take of the Eiffel Tower.
Then he waited.
Six months later, a box arrived at the Village of Montmartre office. It contained Eiffel Tower-adorned KitKats with a graphically enhanced tower image from the photo he had taken. He also received the five other bars featuring unique Canadian attractions: Sign Post Forest (Watson Lake, Yukon); Giant Squid Interpretation Site (Glovers Harbour, N.L.); Dinosaur (Drumheller, Alta.); Flying saucer (Moonbeam, Ont.) and The Grand Gathering (Sainte-flavie, Que.).
Brenner’s immediate response was to stash the secret KitKats in a vault.
“I thought, ‘this is actually happening. After all these months, it’s actually happening.’ ”
The special edition KitKats, some of the eight million being created for the Road Trip Breaks campaign, stayed under wraps in the Village of Montmartre vault for two months.
“It was really hard having this box of chocolate bars here and not being able to say anything,” laughs Brenner. “Like I mean really hard.’ ”
At the village council’s April meeting, the topic of promoting the community came up. Brenner had to bite his tongue.
“I did say something like, ‘there will be something coming up that will make you proud but I can’t tell you what it is,” he chuckles.
The first council member to see the Montmartre KitKat viewed it on Facebook. Councillor Tricia Colvin immediately contacted Brenner with a hearty, “so that’s what you meant.”
“I was extremely shocked, but excited. I thought, ‘how neat it is that our community’s attraction is listed on a national product,” says the village councillor.
All KitKats in Montmartre have since flown off the shelves, even the 30 gathered by Pharmasave owners Jillian and Cole Warren who skulked around Saskatoon riffling through boxes and buying up all the Eiffel Tower KitKats they could find.
“It’s just so cool that we made it on one of the most famous bars,” says pharmacist Jillian Warren, adding that the 30 bars they then sold at their Pharmasave were snapped up almost immediately.
Riona Collar, marketing leader of confectionary Nestlé Canada, says more “surprise locations” will be announced this summer to encourage Canadians to visit unique national attractions.
“We wanted to highlight some amazing yet relatively lesser known Canadian locations to inspire fulfilling road trip breaks for our fans,” says Collar. “We also wanted to feature sites across Canada that we felt our fans would be interested in visiting or learning more about.”
Back in Montmartre, Brenner, Colvin and the Warrens are unsure what the “Road Trip Breaks” summer campaign, which runs from June to August, will mean for their community, but they hope that the KitKat being out of the bag and onto shelves will bring their village some positive attention.
“I’m hopeful that it will draw even more people to the community, and if we are lucky, it will give us national attention so that people come experience our small-town charm,” says Colvin.
