A man who helps run a store that’s a beloved staple of a town some people call Alberta’s “sausage capital” is speaking out after a brazen overnight break-in caused thousands of dollars in damage to the storefront earlier this week.

Staff at Stawnichy’s Mundare Sausage shared surveillance video that shows two thieves as they targeted the store late Wednesday night, smashing through the storefront of the family-run Ukrainian food business that has been around for multiple generations.

Now, the store’s owners are offering 100 rings of their famous sausage to anyone who can link the masked culprits to the crime.

Kyler Zeleny, the store’s assistant general manager and a fourth-generation sausage-maker, said the thieves stole just $80 in coins but their actions resulted in somewhere between $4,000 and $5,000 in damage.

“It’s just so unfortunate in the sense that there’s so much work that has to be done for so little profit for criminals to kind of do this stuff,” Zeleny said.

“It costs us a lot of time and energy that we didn’t need to do. We would rather just be making good products, interacting with our customers, doing our job … [and] not having to board up windows at [4 a.m.]”

Mundare, located 80 kilometres east of Edmonton, is known for its giant, nearly 13-metre high sausage sculpture, which was the brainchild of Zeleny’s grandfather, Edward Stawnichy. 

The break-in

Zeleny said he was already in bed for the night when his phone rang just before midnight on Wednesday, and he was alerted to the store’s alarm having been tripped.

“So there was no sleep that night and luckily my dad’s … a farmer,” he said. “It’s always good to know a farmer. So I said, ‘Grab the two-by-fours. I know where we have some plywood.’”

Zeleny said he and his father spoke with police around 1 a.m., then spent the next four hours acting as impromptu construction workers, boarding up the door and window the thieves smashed to gain entry.

The thieves were in and out of the store in seconds and only grabbed the cash register, which Zeleny said had been mostly emptied the previous evening.

“They were really concerned about having these dimes, nickels and quarters.”

But Zeleny said he was proud of the staff’s quick response, which allowed the store to open by 3 p.m. Thursday.

“So we replaced the door. We found a cash register. So you can come in five hours after we had opened — the day after the break-in — and you can possibly not understand that there even was a break-in.”

In a statement on Friday, Vegreville RCMP said police have located and are forensically analyzing the stolen cash register, but the two suspects remain at large.

A meaty reward

Zeleny said the offer of 100 sausage rings was initially made in jest online, but the reward is real. At current prices, he said the 100 rings would be worth about $1,000.

“That’s the best reward ever. That’s better than money right now,” said Tina Warawa, a Vegreville resident and lifelong customer of the store.

Warawa said Stawnichy’s is a household name in the Mundare area, adding that the break-in is “hard to see, knowing that these guys are such a staple to the community.”

So far, the store has received a few tips that have been passed along to the RCMP, Zeleny said.

He said this long-standing community support will make the break-in just a minor setback in his family’s nearly seven decades of serving Mundare and the wider Alberta community.

“We’re just going to go forward and understand that we’ve been around for 70 years. This is the first time this has happened,” said Zeleny.

“We aren’t going to dwell on it. We’ve been blessed for a very long period of time to have great customers, great team members, and we’re going to think about how we can carry forward.”