"Extreme Barbecue" A Recipe For Market Success

22 MARCH
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

“Extreme Barbecue” A Recipe For Market Success

Combine New Zealand lamb with 40 keen foodies, a celebrity chef, some heavy-duty barbecue equipment, spectacular alpine scenery… and a forecast for snow. What have you got? Winter Grillcamp – a Beef + Lamb New Zealand promotion in Germany.

The event last week launched the farmer organisation’s new season PR programme in Northern Europe. It targeted two key market groups: upwardly mobile young men and women with a keen interest in cooking healthy but delicious food.

“Hosting a barbecue in zero temperatures at the top of Germany’s highest mountain may seem extreme, but we wanted to do something out of the ordinary,” says Nick Beeby, Beef + Lamb New Zealand Market Manager, Emerging Markets.

“The event was run alongside a competition, so we had to have that pull.”

It worked. The competition attracted 8,000 entries from the readers of glossy magazines GQ and Eat Smarter, keen to learn about the secrets to cooking a perfect barbecue from chef Heiko Schulz.

GQ describes itself as the sophisticated choice for its 430,000 readers, “exploring the male universe with intellectual opinion, attitude and style”. Eat Smarter aims to make healthy lifestyles a pleasure, with recipes disproving the prejudice that food that’s good for you can’t taste good too.

The competition winners were invited to the special mountaintop barbecue, as well as a number of popular food writers. Their experience is already generating positive coverage in the press and across the blogosphere.

Chef Schulz cooked five dishes in his signature ‘rebel’ style, all featuring New Zealand lamb:
• Lamb fillet smoked on Jack Daniels chips
• Lamb sirloin filled with scallops and vegetables and cooked in a foil bag
• Lamb shashlik (Turkish-style skewers)
• Lamb racks with New York-style hot spice
• Lamb leg, cooked sous-vide and smoked

The promotion was timed to garner maximum media attention in the crucial run-up to Easter, Beeby said.

“Easter is a key consumption time for lamb so we want to make sure that when people are buying, it’s New Zealand lamb they’re looking to put in their shopping baskets.”

Editors: You can download free high-res images of the Winter Grillcamp from the B+LNZ photo library

About Beef + Lamb New Zealand:
Beef + Lamb New Zealand Ltd is the farmer owned industry organisation representing New Zealand’s sheep and beef farmers. Beef + Lamb New Zealand Ltd invests farmer levies to help develop a growing sheep and beef industry providing sustainable returns for future generations. Beef + Lamb New Zealand has four programmes – Farm, Market, People and Information – to deliver innovative tools and services to support informed decision making, and continuous improvement in market access, product positioning and farming systems for New Zealand’s sheep and beef sector.

ENDS

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