Mac Mart gets a huge shipment of Helluva Good! dip
Credit: hemacmart/instagram
NEED TO KNOW
The owner of Philadelphia’s Mac Mart food stand, Marti Lieberman, shared on March 5 that she received a mysterious shipment of 600 Heluva Good! dips after a brief and suspicious email exchange
While she initially teased a promotion to her customers, she soon realized that she had no insight into “the product’s origin, the handling process, or the intended use of the shipment”
Ultimately, Lieberman made the “responsible decision” to throw away the shipment due to safety concerns
A Philadelphia food stand found itself in a bit of a “French onion pickle.”
On Thursday, March 5, Marti Lieberman, the owner of the Mac Mart MAC’n Cheesery food stand in Philadelphia, claimed on social media that she received a surprise shipment containing 600 containers of Heluva Good! dip.
“I have a bit of a funny story I need to share with you right away because we are in a little bit of a French onion pickle,” Lieberman began on Instagram, going on to explain that she had gotten a suspicious email from overseas offering to send the small business 50 to 100 cases of French onion dip. “I was like, ‘Okay, this sounds weird.”
After sending a few emails back and forth, Lieberman blocked the sender after deciding that the circumstances were a bit too suspicious to be true. Two weeks later, however, a “really nice” delivery man showed up to the food stand with 50 cases of Heluva Good! dip.
“While I have not posted yet about this promotion because it was a surprise to me too, starting tomorrow, with every single order — I don’t even care if you order a Diet Coke or you come to say hi — you are going to get a container of Heluva Good! French onion dip,” she continued on Instagram.
While Lieberman was temporarily convinced that the promotion wasn’t a scam, she soon after realized that she had no insight into “the product’s origin, the handling process, or the intended use of the shipment.” So, she made the difficult decision to throw away all 600 containers of French onion dip.
“Because the product arrived without any prior authorization or coordination — and because the expiration date on the items was very close — we had no way to confidently verify the product’s origin, the handling process, or the intended use of the shipment,” she shared in a March 8 Instagram update. “While the product was most likely safe, the responsible decision on our end was to discard it rather than risk distributing or serving food that had not been properly coordinated, approved, or documented through our business.”
Heluva Good! did not immediately respond to PEOPLE’s request for comment.
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Mac Mart
Credit: hemacmart/instagram
In addition to Lieberman having never “approved participation in any promotional partnership or product distribution program,” it seems even Heluva Good! themselves were “unaware” that the shipment had been sent to the food stand.
“From what we were told, Heluva Good! Runs promotional campaigns through various marketing agencies,” she went on to explain. “Once those agencies complete a campaign, any leftover promotional product is still the responsibility of the marketing agency to handle.”
“It appears that somewhere along the chain, our business in Philadelphia was selected to receive a shipment of the leftover promotional product,” she added. “However, we never approved participation in any promotional partnership or product distribution program, only answered an email or two. When we looked into it further, Heluva Good! themselves were also unaware that this shipment had been sent to us.”
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