UPS Hungary helps Robert Burns International Foundation avoid infamy

Organising a Burns Supper takes a bit of coordination, making sure that all the elements that make up a successful event are planned, arranged and delivered on time to celebrate the birthday of Scotland’s most famous bard.

In the 22 years that the RBIF has held Budapest’s biggest Burns Supper for charity, many things now thankfully run like clockwork, helped by the familiarity of the event location at the Corinthia Hotel, the home of the Burns Supper since 2004.

Yet changes are necessary from time to time, and this year it gives us an opportunity to highlight the logistics behind one of the most important parts of the Burns Supper.

Just a few days before submitting the annual order for our haggis and cheese in early January 2019 we still did not know how we were going to get it to Budapest. Some 140kg of product is not something you can just stick in a suitcase and hope the check-in staff at the airport are sympathetic to your cause. Clearly, we needed help.

And fortunately we got it, all thanks to Jim Kearney, Country Partner at UPS for Hungary, Greece, Romania and Slovenia. After explaining our predicament to Jim, he asked for a little time to discuss the details with his colleagues at UPS Scotland, but we had no reason to worry.

What followed was very slick and professional handling of our logistical problem. Every year we order in excess of 100kg of award-winning haggis from Cockburns Butchers in Dingwall, right in the north of Scotland. This year our 30-40kg of cheese came from Royal Deeside via I.J. Mellis in Edinburgh. So it’s not a simple A to B job either, even more so when it leaves the UK, as shown by the map.

But Jim and his colleague Scott Fowler in Scotland, along with their respective teams, were up to the task. Within 36 hours everything was delivered safe and sound to the Corinthia Hotel in central Budapest, and we all breathed a collective sigh of relief. UPS had saved the RBIF from the infamy of organising a Burns Supper without any haggis, all in the spirit of charity and helping sick and underprivileged children in Hungary.

Just click on the photos to track the route of the haggis and cheese through Europe. We hope you all enjoyed sampling them at the Burns Supper, and a huge thanks to UPS for their voluntary support.