BERN: Double pepperonis and garlic bread get cold waiting at customs, complain Swiss pizza lovers hoping to take advantage of lower French and German prices
A recent ruling by the Swiss authorities has highlighted one of Europe’s more bizarre border rituals: customs inspections of pizza deliveries.
Swiss residents prefer to order their pizzas from across the border in Germany and France, because prices are as much as 30 per cent lower there.
But for the past year their double pepperonis and garlic bread have been getting cold waiting at customs to be inspected, since Switzerland scrapped an earlier exception for food deliveries.
Dismayed by the blow to its pizzerias, the local chamber of commerce in the German region of Upper Rhine-Lake Constance, just across the border, lodged a complaint.
The Swiss customs checks amount to an unfair export ban, it argued, because customs offices are closed at night – the peak time for pizza deliveries – meaning the pizzas cannot get through at all.
The Swiss authorities agreed to listen to their neighbours’ concerns. But after several months of talks on the weighty issue, the director-general of the federal customs, Rudolf Dietrich, made his ruling: there was no case for a “special pizza solution”, he said.
The problem, Mr Dietrich said, was that making an exception for pizza deliveries could set a precedent.
“Bakeries, pharmacies, catering companies, craftsmen, and not least courier companies and the post office could make a similar request,” he said. “It is extremely difficult to draw a line in this case.”
The German chamber of commerce expressed its disappointment at the ruling, but pointed out that Swiss customers can still cross the border and pick up their own pizzas at any time, day or night, without worrying about customs, under rules which exempt private goods.
