Regional Flavours: Time For A Rethink?

August 2, 2018

by Dafyd Martindale

A South Burnett trade delegation recently returned from its annual, weekend-long marketing effort at the Regional Flavours food and wine expo at South Bank.

Regional Flavours claims to be Queensland’s premier food and wine festival, showcasing the State’s best producers and captivating crowds with market stalls, live entertainment, cooking demonstrations, and celebrity meet-and-greets.

As usual, we’ve heard this year’s show was a great success for the South Burnett with fabulous attendance numbers and lots of interest in our region’s food and wine stands.

And as usual, no one seems to know off the top of their heads how much this effort cost.

All the same, it’s the 10th year in a row the South Burnett has sent a team down to spruik the wonders of our foods and wines.

So it is probably timely to review what this has actually achieved.

When Regional Flavours began in 2009, it drew about 42,000 people to South Bank.

While final attendance numbers for this year’s outing are still being calculated, when completed they’re expected to show that about 84,000 came through the gates in 2018.

And that’s a big positive: as a free event, Regional Flavours has doubled in size over the past decade.

But where does it draw its audience?

Well, largely from Brisbane’s estimated 2.3 million population.

So let’s get this right: in a city of 2.3 million, Regional Flavours was only able to draw 3.65 per cent to a FREE festival?

That’s not a very large slice of the food and wine tourism market, is it?

Or perhaps this market segment isn’t quite as big as tourism bodies have hyped it up to be.

The picture gets even bleaker when we look at what results our region has achieved from its 10-year investment in promoting food and wine tourism at Regional Flavours.

In 2009, we had almost double the number of wineries in our region that we have today.

Names like Ziebarth Wines, Stuart Range, Shady Lane Vineyards, Arabesque Winery, Roderick’s Vineyard, Captain’s Paddock, Whistle Stop Wines, the Booie Range Distillery and more are now just distant memories of a boom that came … and went.

We also had roughly double the number of tourism operators we have today, including several who were regular exhibitors at Regional Flavours but no longer exist – Taste South Burnett, as one example.

In fairness, there were other factors that came into play during the last decade that contributed to this spectacular implosion in our region’s tourism.

The 2011 and 2013 floods are two disasters that immediately spring to mind. So was the GFC. And the great Australian ‘wine lake’ didn’t help either.

But whatever the cause, it seems clear Regional Flavours has not helped us reverse the situation

So if Council’s aim in sponsoring local producers and chefs to attend this event is to turn things around in this market segment, then Regional Flavours is clearly not delivering, has never delivered and even if it could, would never deliver much.

Harvard historian George Santayana famously warned that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”.

After 10 years of investment – a fair try-out of the concept, in anybody’s language – we think Council would be wise to heed him and start looking elsewhere to see if there might be more productive ways to spend our money.

There probably are.

But we’ll never find them if we keep focussing on things that don’t work.

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  Editorial, Tourism