The project “Livonian Culinary Route” strengthens the identity of our common culinary heritage, promotes the historical significance and impact of Livonia on today’s modern cuisine and tastes of Estonia and Latvia, and involves over 250 food providers and producers from both countries.
Our main goals within this project:
- We want to improve cross-border co-operation between tourism and catering businesses and local food producers and promote the usage of locally grown ingredients in food preparation. Project establishes strong regional co-operation networks between tourism/catering businesses and local food producers/farmers. Only food providers and producers using local culinary traditions and local ingredients will be involved to the route, because we want to introduce culinary traditions of each region, often originating from Livonian times.
- We will introduce new culinary route dedicated to Livonian heritage that will integrate the regional culinary route of Via Hanseatica – TasteHanseatica . We shall promote the route to domestic and foreign visitors as attractive culinary tourism destination bringing out the similarities and differences between the local cuisines based on local traditions.
Main activities (not a full list):
Development of the culinary tourism product. For creating the route we will set up criteria for the joint culinary route ; select potential participants and create a joint story about the historical significance and impact of Livonia state on development of similarities and differences in today’s Estonian and Latvian cuisine. In addition we will create a regional brand TasteHanseatica promoting culinary heritage of Via Hanseatica territory located in the heart of Old Livonia.
Capacity building and strengthening the networking of culinary heritage based service providers. For efficient service provision knowledge and cooperation are essential preconditions. We will arrange joint and local practical seminars and food workshops for tourism/catering businesses to address general heritage-food specific topics and pass on the knowledge from tourism experts to wider interest group. We will create regional farmer-food provider networks, learn from other regions; collect and disseminate information about our culinary heritage (e.g. handbook of recipes).
Extensive marketing. We will create new visual identity for the culinary route and promote our route both in domestic and international markets. As tourism relies on emotions and experiences we shall invite bloggers, journalists, travel agents to our route allowing them to enjoy our culinary heritage and disseminate emotions on our behalf. And we shall have both online and printed materials for our visitors.
Project partners:
Estonian Chamber of Agriculture and Commerce, NGO Estonian Rural Tourism, Latvian Country Tourism Association “Lauku celotajs”, Vidzeme Planning Region, Foundation Jõgeva County Development and Enterprise Centre, Foundation Tartu County Tourism, Foundation Valga County Development Agency
Project duration:
01.05.2017 – 30.04.2020 (36 months)
Project budget:
1 059 789 EUR, including support of the Estonia – Latvia Programme 900 821 EUR
Contacts:
Sille Talvet-Unt, Project coordinator, sille.talvet@gravitas.ee