Smoke’s Poutinerie is taking its poutine-eating championships on the road. The Toronto-based foodservice company has created the Smoke’s Poutinerie World Famous Great Canadian Cross-Country Plaid Gravy Train Fries Curd & Gravy Weird Wild and Wacky Poutine Eating Tour 2014 or, as the company says, “SPWFGCCCPGTFCGWWWPET2014 for short.”
The tour will hit 17 cities in 17 days and feature three of the world’s top competitive eaters: ‘Furious Pete’ Czerwinski; Tim ‘Gravy’ Brown and Pat ‘Deep Dish’ Bertoletti. Every event will dish out free poutine to event-goers.
For the past four years, Smoke’s Poutinerie—a Canada-wide poutine franchise—has held its World Poutine Eating Championships in Toronto. “We’ve been working with these competitive eaters for a number of years now and we wanted to take the fun of [the championships] and create a national tour around it,” said Danica Linnemann, marketing manager at Smoke’s Poutinerie.
“As brand, we certainly have grown a lot within the Ontario region, but people out west are still getting to know us. So, we want to bring our brand out there and show them that we’re fun.”
The cross-country tour kicked off in Halifax on Aug. 5 with a “Man vs. Donair” eating competition and will conclude in Vancouver on Aug. 19 with a zombie poutine-eating challenge. “We’ve tried to put our creative minds together and come up with something unique and beyond anything that’s been attempted before,” said Linnemann.
Updates on the tour will be posted to the brand’s Facebook page and Twitter account.
Smoke’s Poutinerie, which was created in 2008 by former ad man Ryan Smolkin, now has 80 franchise locations across Canada and is expanding into the U.S. The company does almost no traditional media, relying instead on events and social media.
