Gourmet Challenge

The aim of The Gourmet Challenge was to increase sales in our staff restaurants, to create a talking point and a buzz throughout our units and to give our customers an opportunity to get together in a fun and sociable way.

We came up with “The Gourmet Challenge”, a campaign to test our customers’ knowledge of food. How did it work? Each of our staff restaurants was given rolls of self-adhesive stickers featuring a green ? The beauty of this promotion was that each of our catering managers could target specific products in their own staff restaurant. Each unit has a different financial dynamic so it was important to ensure flexibility.

Every customer who purchased a ? labelled product received a “Trivia” style scratch card. If they scratched the correct answer, the card was placed in a special box .The Catering Manager of each unit had to draw one winner and send this into Head Office. Once all the unit winners had arrived at Head Office a further draw was made to pick 50 semi-finalists who were invited to compete in the Final.

The Final was held at London Zoo on Wednesday 7th November and started with a champagne and canapé reception in the Bugs House, with some animal encounters to set the scene. This was followed with a quick fire round of 50 questions using an electronic scoring system to find the final 10 contestants. The evening was broken up with a number of food stations for everyone to taste while the scores were being marked. Read more >>