Breakfast with a difference

It was a delight to be invited by Jean O Connell of O Connell Marketing to attend the Taste Wexford Breakfast Industry Showcase with special guest, hospitality guide Georgina Campbell at Johnstown Castle recently.

The event is part of Taste Wexford’s Food Tourism Training Programme, inviting local producers to explore the theme, ‘Why serving a good regional breakfast makes economic sense for your hospitality business.’

Supported by Visit Wexford and Wexford Local Development, the well-attended showcase endeavoured to shine a light on the delicious Wexford produce available to create those most talked about breakfasts.

After all, as Georgina Campbell pointed out in her well-constructed, practical keynote speech, ‘Breakfast is often the only meal your guest will enjoy at your establishment, and most usually the last meal they will partake of before leaving you, and yet many in the hospitality trade do not place the same emphasis on breakfast as they might on lunch or dinner.’

Georgina went on to encourage those in hospitality to firstly use local produce and then promote it and its food story ad nauseum on menus, on blackboards, on billboards, on social media, indeed anywhere that people are likely to read.

Tell the local food story was most definitely the message of the morning.

Buy local, buy in season, and make food, especially breakfast, an experience for your guest, was the theme hammered home to the large audience by all the guests – Georgina; Ali Honour, chef at the Imperial Hotel, Cork; Anthony O`Toole, international food and travel advisor; Sharon Noonan, MC of the event and tourism and hospitality marketing consultant; Trudie Power, Chair of Wexford Food Family; Paul Finnegan, Chair of Visit Wexford; Tom Bermingham, Wexford Local Development; Billy Byrne, Tourism Officer, Wexford Co. Council; Jean O Connell, Taste Wexford & O Connell Marketing; and Lorraine O’Dwyer, food tourism guide.

Advice and ideas aplenty floated liberally around the exquisite, historic Johnstown venue before everyone was invited to partake of the mouth-wateringly, scrumptious display of cold and ambient dishes that would enhance any breakfast menu, whether hotel, B&B, or café.

Make everything an experience for the visitor, we have such an abundance of local produce in Wexford and collaboration is the key to success.

Mindful of the increased footfall to the county with the port at Rosslare looking forward to welcoming over a million extra passengers from Spanish, French, and UK markets, we need to elongate the time spent in Wexford and in the South East region, and it is the small things that are memorable as Georgina Campbell put it, ‘Give them a variety of breads at breakfast, people all over the globe love bread and love sampling homemade varieties and if they like it, you will have made a customer for life.’