It may be over 40 years since a group of Breton vegetable growers launched a brand that has become one of the most important in Europe, but it took this week’s arrival at London’s Tower Bridge of a replica 18th century tall-ship laden with fresh onions from Saint-Malo to remind me just how far-reaching their initiative was four decades ago, and how relevant it remains today.

The Prince de Bretagne brand brings together fresh vegetables grown by more than 2,000 producers in Brittany. This region of western France most closely resembles Cornwall, including very favourable conditions for growing a wide range of fresh vegetables.

So it is that in Brittany the warming effects of the Gulf Stream help to produce staples of the British diet and in 2009 the region won the prestigious AOC status for onions from Roscoff – the same ones that made the trip on the tall-ship that’s been moored at Tower Bridge over the last few days.

It’s a fair bet that if you go to this year’s Christmas fancy dress party dressed as a Frenchman you’ll put on a beret to go with your false moustache and fake accent, and you’ll even tie a string of onions round your neck. In Brittany they’ll do the onion stringing for you – indeed bunches of hand-stringed onion tresses go like hotcakes on the local market in France, selling at under €5 at your neighbourhood Lidl and more than €8 at an upscale Monoprix.

Breton onions were first marketed in Britain back in the 1920s, when peletons of so-called Johnnies brought their bikes across the Channel to pedal round England’s towns and villages selling stringed onions door to door.

Today’s marketing budgets won’t stretch to the likes of our new cycling heroes Bradley Wiggins or Chris Hoy to bring onions to market, but we cycling-mad Britons could do worse than to remind ourselves of the qualities of Brittany’s excellent, sweet-tasting onions.

The same applies to any upcoming supermarket buyer who is looking for something new to excite a category that’s become rather caught in the commodity trap. The Bretons are lucky enough to have some substantial marketing budgets at their disposal too, and I for one would be glad to see something new to excite the category.

At the same time it seems to me that French vegetables deserve more space on our supermarket shelves. The Bretons reminded us this week they have some clever ideas to help their product onto the market. And as a nice lady reminded me when we got talking in the supermarket queue last week, she’d be glad to buy more French produce. It just tastes good, she told me. And if you say it in French it sounds sexy too. Go on, give it a try. —