Family & Visitor Attraction Awards 2019

Page 4 www.lux-review.com LUX 2019 Family & Visitor Attraction Awards A unique combination of an agriculture show, farmer’s market and family day out, eat:Festivals are designed to entice a wide variety of guests, gourmets and food producers. Bev and Sarah Milner Simonds, the dynamic team behind the multi-award-winning food and drink festivals, discuss how they created the events to prove that food events can focus on the producers and the place and still make a profit as a social enterprise. “eat:Festivals were born out of a desire to reconnect people with the productive landscape that surrounds us. We moved to a town surrounded by farms but there was a disconnect between residents and the landscape; the town is made up of housing estates and holiday parks named after the farms that used to exist here. “As a result, the people who live here no longer work on the land, but they may still want to have a connection to the landscape that surrounds them. Through our events we try to enable that relationship to be meaningful, to have economic value, and to be socially rewarding. We started with one event in our hometown in 2012 and we have grown steadily and in 2019 will deliver 16 festivals in nine host towns. “Today, the festivals provide face-to-face trading interactions for producers from a wide rural area and we work with over 300 micro and SME business per year. Primary producers from within 25 miles of the festival location have priority, and we cover an area spanning Exmoor to the Mendips, the Levels and a long stretch of coastline.” Inspired by a need to reconnect with food and the way it is produced, eat:Festivals offers local festivals throughout Somerset. We invited the visionaries behind the events to tell us more. eat:Festivals: Culinary Festival of the Year - Somerset © eat:Festivals © eat:Festivals