SELLING IRELAND:TOURISM BUSINESSES need to put good-quality local food at the centre of their offering to visitors, a conference has been told.
Good food is a unique selling point that can help drive growth, according to Margaret Jeffares of Good Food Ireland.
Small artisanal producers need to be protected and nurtured or they will disappear, she said. “If we wake up in five years’ time and they are gone, the tourism story will be gone, too, and we will have nothing to offer visitors,” she told an open meeting of the Food Safety Authority of Ireland’s consultative council.
The eight million tourists who come to Ireland each year spend more than a third of their money on food and drink, she pointed out. Good local food gives visitors a sense of the place they are visiting and makes them feel they are in a different culture. Promoting Irish food also helps boost demand for it abroad, she said.
While there is a perception that food and drink in Ireland are expensive, Jeffares added, research showed that 80 per cent of visitors were fairly satisfied with the prices they paid.
The meeting, which was devoted to the question “Should Ireland’s food be Irish?”, also heard that formal EU recognition of Irish food specialities is low compared with those of other member states. Just four Irish foods have been granted a denomination, compared with 119 from Italy and 12 from Poland, a relatively new member state.
