15,000 Eggs Accidentally Delivered to Norway’s Olympic Team

Chefs for Norway’s Olympic team were met with a big surprise when an egg delivery arrived at their kitchens in South Korea this weekend. A translation error apparently caused a Korean grocery-delivery service to ship 15,000 eggs to the Norwegian Olympic camp, as opposed to the 1,500 they thought they'd ordered.

According to Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten, the chefs used Google Translate to request their order, but apparently something got lost in translation, and ten times the amount of eggs the caterers needed arrived.

“We received half a truckload of eggs,” said Stale Johansen, Team Norway’s chef, to Aftenposten. “There was no end to the delivery. Absolutely unbelievable,” he added.

There’s no doubt the Olympic team will go through a lot of eggs: Johansen said he plans to make plenty of omelets, boiled and fried eggs, and scrambled eggs with smoked salmon. But it’s unlikely that the athletes could take down quite so many unless they ate nothing but eggs for a long time. However, Johansen’s team does plan to serve food 24 hours a day, so nothing’s impossible.

Leaving the challenges to the Olympians, Johansen managed to return the surplus of eggs. “Fortunately, we returned most, but we were quite surprised when they carried up the eggs,” Johansen said.

Before making the 13,500-egg return, good-natured chefs posted a photo to Twitter explaining the mixup. The post, written in Norwegian, reads: “The OL camp ordered 1500 eggs through translating through Google Translate. But it was wrong. 15,000 was delivered to the door. We wish good luck and hope that the Norwegian golden hopes are happy—very happy—in eggs.”