A new promotional campaign, designed to drive purchases of British leeks has recently been launched to great industry applaud. It intends to build on the gains seen during the pandemic, which saw sale volumes up by nearly 9% in 2021. The initiative is backed by a group of sixteen leek growers and seed companies.

This year, the Leek Growers Association has partnered with popular vegan social influencer and food writer Lucy Parker, who posts as @lucy_and_lentils and has over 168,000 followers on Instagram. Her easy to prepare, accessible recipes and extensive reach across a wide range of social media channels, will help the campaign reach and engage with younger audiences.

In addition to social media, a comprehensive media relations PR campaign, targeting national and regional consumer media and news channels is to be rolled out.

Hortnews.com quoted Tim Casey, Leek Growers Association Chairman, as saying: “Increasingly consumers are using social media as a resource for information on food, nutrition and recipes. In fact, recent research* showed that 21% of Britons use Instagram for recipes ideas, four in ten use social media videos to follow a recipe and 26% follow foodie social influencers.”

On the broadcast will be:

Tim Casey. Leek Grower - Bomber County Produce and Chairman of the Leek Growers Association.

Lucy Parks, Lucy and Lentils. @LucyandLentils - Plant based food blogger.  Way back before it was cool Lucy became vegetarian when the word vegan was but a faint whisper and the most exciting thing to hit the market was Linda McCartney veggie sausages! 

Going to university made it abundantly clear she was also a terrible cook. But with a mission to be a little more self-sufficient she turned to social media for guidance. This is where Lucy and Lentils was 'born'. So what started as a hobby for Lucy has now become her job! Splitting her time between sponsored work on Instagram, food photography for brands and independents in Nottingham as well as recipe creating for similar start-up companies.