Discount retailer Lidl faces a €200,000 Christmas dinner bill after an offer of chicken vol-au-vents and ice cream cake for the poor went viral.
The supermarket launched a Twitter campaign in Belgium on Monday, saying it would hand out five four-course dinners to food banks for each tweet on a hash tag.
Lidl had expected to hand out about 1,000 of the €20 dinner packs, a spokesman for the German company’s Belgium unit said yesterday. However local newspapers wrote about it and people retweeted using the hash tag #luxevooriedreen, Dutch for “luxury for everyone”.
By the end of the 24-hour campaign, 1,500 people had tweeted, meaning Lidl has to deliver 7,500 Christmas dinners. To quash reports the supermarket had been caught out, Lidl rounded up the number to 10,000 and branded the campaign a success.