Miele Canada has launched a culinary challenge to find new cooking talent and promote its first freestanding range produced specifically for the North American market.
Developed in-house, the Miele Culinary Challenge aims to bring out amateur and professional chefs who have a passion for food and are seeking a platform to showcase their talent, says Kelly Lam, vice-president, marketing at Miele Canada in Vaughan, Ont.
The campaign is linked to Miele’s partnership with the first Toronto Food & Wine Festival to be held September 18-20 at the Evergreen Brick Works in Toronto.
The winner will be featured at the Miele Kitchen at the festival, have the opportunity to do an internship with a celebrity chef at an international restaurant, open a pop-up restaurant at the St. Lawrence Market Miele Kitchen for one week and receive a 30” Miele range worth $8,999. The new range has “launched us into professional cooking for the home,” Lam says.
The competition consists of three rounds. In the first round, contestants submit a three minute video telling the story of one dish or meal that inspired them to become a chef. The initial video submissions are due Aug. 24.
Selected contestants (the number has not yet been established) will then present their dish in Toronto. Each participant will have 15 minutes to prepare their dish and tell the story behind it to judges, one of whom will be a celebrity chef.
The top five chefs then compete in a cook-off with a “black box” of mystery ingredients to test their skills and culinary creativity, presenting a main course dish to the judges who will include two celebrity judges.
“They’ll have an hour to come up with a dish. We will expect them to create something that’s derivative of what their original inspiration to start cooking was,” says Lam.
The event is being promoted through Miele’s and the festival’s social media networks as well as through newspaper ads. People are being asked: “Do you have what it takes to be the next great chef?” Miele also has a microsite for the challenge.
After the festival is completed, Miele will work with the winning chef to open up a pop-up restaurant at St. Lawrence Market.
“The draw for the chefs is the ability to have their own booth and cook alongside celebrity chefs who will drop by during the event,” Lam says of the competition. “We’ve received really positive reactions to giving that opportunity to chefs who never would have had the opportunity to make it to the food and wine festival.”
Maverick Public Relations is handling media relations.
