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Okanagan-Taste

Loving local products

Your favourite local agricultural fair may be coming back in some form later this summer or early fall, so feel free to start taking bets on where you might soon find a gigantic pumpkin.

Even if your local “fall fair” is not yet back in the swing of things, surely you’ve got pictures and selfies of yourself enjoying B.C. products or creating delicious dishes while locked in the house for weeks thanks to the pandemic.

Don’t delete those pics, as you can celebrate local products through a new photo contest supporting the province’s agricultural sector and the now familiar Buy BC program.

The British Columbia Association of Agricultural Fairs and Exhibitions (BC Fairs) and the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Fisheries’ Buy BC program are encouraging folks to attend fairs and exhibitions (if you can), to enter this new photo contest, which runs from Aug. 2 to Sept. 26, 2021.

Participants can enter by downloading the new BC Fairs app – available through the App Store and Google Play, and follow the steps to upload a picture. Selfies are encouraged, as well as pictures of any made-in-B.C. food or beverage product, or a B.C. fair or farm. Entries can also be submitted online at bcfairs.ca if you’re not an app person.

This includes those artistic selfies and sunset pics of wine, beer, spirit, or cider bottles held up at sunset to create a perfect Instagram-worthy shot. And that local charcuterie you created at home or took 10 pictures of at a local bistro … so you could get the perfect angle.

Photos could also include B.C. farms, fairs and agritourism businesses, as well shots of produce, dairy, meats and seafood.

There are weekly prizes to be won by random selection, and you can enter multiple times. A grand prize winner will be drawn from the weekly winners at the end of September.

The province’s Buy BC program encourages British Columbians to enjoy a wide range of B.C grown, harvested, and produced food and beverage products from local stores, and 17 fairs are participating in this #buybc contest in their own communities.

Look for the Buy BC symbol at local grocery stores and farmers markets to enjoy and explore local products and feel good about supporting B.C. farmers and producers.

Keep the love local message going and growing. Full details are available here.

This article is written by or on behalf of an outsourced columnist and does not necessarily reflect the views of Castanet.



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About the Author

A creative thinker with more than two decades of experience in communications, Allison is an early adopter of social and digital media, bringing years of work in traditional media to the new frontier of digital engagement marketing through her company, All She Wrote.

She is the winner of the Thompson Okanagan Tourism Association's 2011 and 2012 awards for Social Media Initiative, an International LERN award for marketing, and the 2014 Penticton Chamber of Commerce Business Excellence Award for Hospitality/Tourism.

Allison has amassed a following on multiple social networks of more than 30,000, frequently writes and about social media, food and libations as well as travel and events, and through her networks, she led a successful bid to bring the Wine Bloggers Conference to Penticton in June 2013, one of the largest social media wine events in the world, generating 31 million social media impressions, $1 million in earned media, and an estimated ongoing economic impact of $2 million.

In 2014, she held the first Canadian Wine Tourism Summit to spark conversation about the potential for wine tourism in Canada as a year-round economic driver.

Allison contributes epicurean content to several publications, has been a judge for several wine and food competitions, and has earned her advanced certificate from the Wine and Spirit Education Trust.

In her spare time, she has deep, meaningful conversations with her cats.

She can be reached at [email protected]



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The views expressed are strictly those of the author and not necessarily those of Castanet. Castanet does not warrant the contents.

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