This will be the third consecutive year the Mushroom Bureau has supported the Vegetarian Society in its highly publicised Vegetarian Week (May 24-30).
“For us this campaign has the benefit of targeting a very specific group,” says the Bureau’s Victoria Lloyd-Davies. “Vegetarians are very important to us simply because they buy a lot of mushrooms.”
Vegetarian Week is expected to reach 26 million people this year and the benefits of increased exposure are far-reaching. “The Vegetarian Society has become much more media and website orientated than in the past,” says Lloyd-Davies. “It is an enormous benefit to us that we can be involved in this joint campaign and it also provides us with a very definite promotional angle.”
Mushrooms are a generic vegetable and as such, the Mushroom Bureau has been approached by food companies looking to link-up promotions. “I think we can get much further and get much more publicity if we are not too specific,” says Lloyd-Davies, “and in that way Vegetarian Week suits us very well. The timing is also good since it is at the end of May - although mushrooms are grown and picked every day of the year - May, to us, is very important. This is when the weather starts to improve and so the usage of mushrooms changes accordingly. Although consumers do eat a lot during the winter months, it is primarily in hot dishes. May is the time when we want people to switch their ideas about how they eat mushrooms - and so it is an ideal time to promote new meal ideas.”
Persuading the public to incorporate mushrooms into lighter, salad recipes should no longer be a problem now that the Food Standards Agency has withdrawn its advice on peeling and cooking all mushrooms. “This should benefit the industry enormously,” says Lloyd-Davies. “Hopefully it will keep mushroom consumption up in the summer months.”
This is the twelfth year of Vegetarian Week and there will be no shortage of recipes to choose from. To mark the rise of the vegetarian gourmet, chefs from The Vegetarian Society’s Cordon Vert School have come up with a sensational seasonal menu that makes a meal out of modern ingredients and unusual flavours.
“In 2002, the theme was based on recipes from around the world, so there were seven days of vegetarian meals with seven different recipes, and I added seven recipes using different types of cultivated mushrooms,” explains Lloyd-Davies. “This year is a straight vegetarian theme which, along with the gourmet recipes will incorporate store-cupboard ideas. We have developed recipes and photographs and have been feeding them through to the regional and consumer press. The Vegetarian Society will distribute 7,000 posters. 5,000 of those will go to 20 different cities with the remaining 2,000 to different schools. There will also be half a million fliers in libraries, restaurants and cafes which have the Mushroom Bureau’s logo and website address - that helps us reach a much wider audience than we normally would.”
The link-up between the Mushroom Bureau and the Vegetarian Society seems a natural one considering the importance of mushrooms in any vegetarian’s diet. “There are so many different types of mushrooms and they can be used in a lot of ways - from salads and soups, to cooked on the barbecue and all of our recipes are nutritionally balanced in terms of fat and calorie content,” says Lloyd-Davies.
With the Vegetarian Society hoping to sign up 20,000 new members as a result of the campaign, many of the Mushroom Bureau’s members are actively supporting the idea. “But,” says Lloyd-Davies, “although the bureau is continually pushing different recipe ideas on TV and radio, there is more that needs to be accomplished when it comes to promoting mushrooms in-store.
“In terms of price promotions, retailers should be much more sophisticated in how they promote their products,” she says. “They are not using the experience and knowledge that is so readily available in the industry. For example, the mushroom cookbook is only mentioned on Asda’s bags but consumers do write in and ask for it. If other retailers put that information on their bags then it would drive up interest in mushrooms. There is a wealth of information available about mushrooms but many retailers will only use price promotions and BOGOFS. Price has never come into it with mushrooms and they have a short shelf life anyway. Labels on pre-packs are not doing as much as they could to promote product usage either.”
A dedicated mushroom week is on the top of the Mushroom Bureau’s wish list and with European funding might possibly become a reality. “The Republic of Ireland is now looking at ways of joining with the UK and the Netherlands to do this,” says Lloyd-Davies, “but there has to be three countries in order to get the support.”
Lack of funds for promotional campaigns is by no means a unique situation in the produce industry but the fact that mushrooms are a commodity product is a drawback and makes it very difficult to create a brand. “We have made every effort to brand mushrooms, but the fact that they are called so many different things in different stores makes it impossible,” says Lloyd-Davies.
Poor quality is another problem that affects the end-consumer and ultimately hampers consumption. “Mushrooms should always be chilled after picking,” says Lloyd-Davies. “On farms they are put into chillers and then into chilled lorries and taken into depots. They leave farms in perfect condition and arrive at their destination in fantastic quality. Shoppers purchase about 1,500lbs of mushrooms from each average-sized supermarket each week. However there does seem to be a lack of understanding as to how they should be treated in-store. Everyone knows that red fruit such as strawberries and raspberries are delicate but some people do not realise that mushrooms bruise just as easily. The quality that comes out of the farms is just superb, and as an industry as a whole enormous care and trouble is taken to ensure they arrive at the retailers in the best possible condition. If this care is not maintained then quality suffers and that is quite depressing.”
It is not just mushrooms, of course, that benefit from Vegetarian Week. This year the Society has launched a new edition of Food for Thought - a guide to anyone considering becoming a vegetarian. And it is also launching a new leaflet campaign that aims to solve those lunchtime sandwich dilemmas and show that choosing vegetarian food is an easy and delicious decision, for lunch - and for life.
There are three different ‘veg-head’ leaflets, each featuring a recipe for a vegetarian sandwich that doesn’t resort to cheese featuring Luscious Lettuce, Uber Gine and Mora Mushroom - in shops, pubs, cafés and information centres.
Admittedly, there are other ways to increase consumption, says Lloyd-Davies, including the 5-a-day scheme and The Little Red Tractor. “There are many different initiatives but at the moment 5-a-day seems to be about fruit more than anything else - that is what seems to be taking the lion’s share of the campaign.
“5-a-day is a slow-growing initiative although it does have the potential to grow - but I believe we will get there much faster with the Vegetarian Society.
“Ultimately, if you look closely at the UK mushroom industry you’ll see that the economics are very bad. Returns are low - there is over capacity from Europe and UK production is being replaced by imports from the Republic of Ireland, the Netherlands and Poland. Prices have not risen for many years and in some cases have actually dropped, and there is no money with which to implement an advertising campaign. This initiative with the Vegetarian Society has worked out very successfully for us and we have seen good results on the basis that mushrooms are a key vegetable and are being promoted during Vegetarian Week. There is definitely scope for others to get involved. If there were more support from the industry for Vegetarian Week then I’m sure the supermarkets would listen.”
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