This was a desparate last-ditch marketing ploy of a now-defunct
Bergen bakery to cover up a fatally expensive mistake.
The
Bergenzerbrøterei was actually doing quite well in 1990, and was preparing to expand. An order for new bread ovens, with dimensions in centimeters, was prepared. Annoyingly, the company's secretaries were all on vacation, forcing the Vice-president in charge of Procurement to type the order up and send it off to the bread oven company in Oslo.
And so, the order as sent to the bread-oven company gave dimensions in
meters instead of centimeters. The oven company hired 300 new employees, flew them all up to Bergen, and built a 100-meter-wide bread oven on site. You can imagine the CEO's astonishment when he came into work the next day. Which is nothing compared to his reaction 30 days later when the bill came.
The
marketing department was stuck with the problem of how to
create product to offset the tremendous expense.
And thus was born the whale sandwich -- an entire
Atlantic Right whale between two enormous slices of the Bergenzerbrøterei's finest. Sadly, only one whale sandwich was ever sold (to Australian publishing magnate
Rupert Murdoch), and the company soon ran out of dough and folded.