Produce suppliers Univeg and Mack Multiples are funding a stonefruit sampling tour taking place this week under the umbrella campaign Adventures in Fruit.
Run by marketing agency Pink Sky, Adventures in Fruit consists of various campaigns throughout the year for different fruit categories, with the overall aim to build a bank of followers and promote wider consumption and education across the fruit category. Each 'mini' campaign is backed by one or more produce firm that supplies Marks and Spencer. The campaign is not run using funding from M&S, but is run by suppliers with the retailer's permission. It centres around premium fruit, and is designed to ‘get the fruit out of the stores in order to get more customers into the stores’.
The current phase is promoting in-season speciality stonefruit, including yellow and white peaches and nectarines, doughnut peaches, greengages, and Mirabelle plums.
The 'stonefruit tour' is visiting various locations in the south of England over the next three weeks, offering sampling and giveaways, with tour dates being promoted through the Adventures in Fruit Twitter page. If shoppers then purchase fruit in store they will receive a ‘Make Every Day an Adventure’ goodie bag.
Sampling was chosen as a marketing activity for the campaign after research commissioned for M&S showed that shoppers easily lose confidence in an entire fruit category if they taste one bad fruit. The idea is to promote seasonality of fruit, and educate shoppers about varieties and differences in flavours.
“Not many customers are aware of varieties beyond those that are heavily marketed, and may not know how different, for example, two blueberry varieties might taste to one another,” said Pink Sky managing director, Naomi Turner.
“We want to help to give customers the ability to shop according to their values by letting them taste the fruit rather than expecting them to make purchasing decisions based on guesswork surrounding a balance of appearance and price. This so often leads to disappointment.”
The stonefruit promotion will be followed by an experiential campaign for bananas, pineapples and strawberries at family festival Carfest South, funded by Compagnie Fruitiere UK and BerryWorld, where a stand will host ‘smoothie bikes’ to raise money for charity and sampling of fruit including the 'Sweet Eve' strawberry variety.
Adventures in Fruit also recently hosted a Thai fruit evening in London to highlight the range of produce on sale from Thailand in the UK, funded by quality certificate the Thai Trust Mark.
The next event is a Worldwide Fruit-backed British Apples and Pears supper club and orchard tour, held in a Kent orchard in late September. It is part of a wider series of events to promote British top fruit, including sampling and competitions. A visit to the Space Centre, in Leicester, will this week promote Rockit apples from New Zealand as the first part of this top-fruit campaign.
'We wanted to keep it under one brand to build up a bank of followers, and that's really started happening this year,' Turner added. 'The suppliers have started to realise they can help each other, and we now get people recognising the brand at trade fairs and remembering they get good fruit from us.'
