On Friday 9 June, online consumer platform Love my Salad took a group of German, Austrian and Dutch food bloggers on a journey into the world of tomatoes. At the end of the event, which was hosted by Prominent Tomatoes, the bloggers headed home filled with inspiration, product knowledge and interesting stories.
“Food bloggers are an important target group for the vegetable chain,” states Annelies Blauwkamer, community manager of Love My Salad, Rijk Zwaan’s social salad network initiative. “They can interact with consumers in a personal and accessible way and, with their appealing recipes and features, are a source of inspiration. Breeding companies, growers but also professional chefs, for example, can support this target group by sharing knowledge and ideas with them. So this event really created a win-win situation.”
Conveying a passion for tomatoes
The bloggers were treated to an inspiring tomato workshop at a high-end restaurant in Rotterdam, where all manner of uses for the tomato were demonstrated; even the stalk was used to make an aromatic powder. The group then took a boat trip on an authentic barge through the Westland region of the Netherlands, during which they heard about the history of the Dutch horticultural sector. The day concluded at the coastal resort of Hoek van Holland with a workshop on the Big Green Egg barbecue and a ‘salad challenge’ for all the food bloggers.
“The tomato is often regarded as a standard product,” comments Wim van den Berg from Prominent. “But there is so much to say about it, and there are so many different types and ways of using it! For example, a cocktail tomato is the ideal tomato for salads. Consumers don’t always realise that, and on Friday even the food bloggers discovered a whole new world of opportunities. A number of new blog posts have already been published online since the event, and we hope that this ‘partnership on a plate’ will have given another boost to the versatile tomato’s popularity.”
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