Cromwell bake sale undercut by second bake sale on opposite corner, ginger crunch now a buyer's market

A fundraiser for the Year 6 camp outside the Cromwell Mall on Saturday morning was undercut by a second bake sale on the opposite corner. The rival table turned up forty minutes later and sold the same slices for less.

The camp table had a trestle borrowed from the rugby club and three parents behind it. On offer were three trays of lolly cake, two of louise cake and a ginger crunch. Organiser Hine Ratana said the ginger crunch was "the school one, the one everyone makes". By ten past nine the netball club had a gazebo up across the road and the same ginger crunch for fifty cents cheaper.

"We'd been there since eight," Ratana said. "We had the sign. We had the chilly bin. Then Shona's lot pull up with a gazebo, which, I mean, for a bake sale. And I'm not saying they copied, because it's the school recipe, but it's — look, it's the same icing. You can see it from here. That's our icing."

By half ten the louise cake had dropped from two dollars to a dollar fifty on both corners. The netball side then threw in a cup of tea with any slice. The camp side responded by cutting bigger pieces. Ratana's sister-in-law Donna, whose boy drives the fruit truck out of Bannockburn, said that was "not a strategy, that's just a bigger knife". A panner over from Finland for the world championships bought from both tables and walked back and forth with his findings. Each side has since claimed he preferred theirs.

The school's PTA chair said both sales were "fully sanctioned". She added there had "never been a policy on corners, as such, because it hadn't come up, but it's come up now, so". Asked which corner was the school's, she said that was "probably a question for the board".

Both tables sold out by one. The gazebo, it emerged on Sunday, belongs to the school. The camp committee has been looking for it since the gala.