Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 11 October 2023

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Agriculture, Food and the Marine

Challenges Facing the Fruit and Vegetable Industry: Discussion

Mr. Lorcan Bourke:

A millennial is a person who is between 20 and 35 years old, and includes young parents and parents of young children. Bord Bia has two millennial programmes that promotes the consumption of fruit and vegetables, and potatoes. We partner with France, Belgium and some trade associations on the Continent. We receive 80% funding from the EU for significant campaigns across public relations and social media. We have developed two websites called fruitnveg.ieand potato.ie. Our job is to land exciting new recipes, not traditional ones, with millennials. We have 320 potato recipes, which is a lot, and we have 32 fruit and vegetable recipes. For promotion we use significant channels and millennials trawl Instagram for their information. We are advertising and putting articles in place. This is all courtesy of 80% of funding from partnership across the EU and our own industry provides 20% of the funding.