Explore Whitby Totes

In 2024, The Town of Whitby successfully piloted guided Food Tours. The tours featured over 40 local restaurants and eateries and hosted 400 participants. The slogan for the tours was to “sip, sample, savor, stroll and shop”. Food tour goers were encouraged to shop at local participating businesses. To make shopping more enticing, an Explore Whitby tote bag was created where participants could store their newly purchased local goods and hold leftovers.  

 The Explore Whitby Tote bag was (and still is) an effective promotional tourism item. First, the bag’s design has the Town’s recognizable “swoosh” alongside writing “@explorewhitby” which is the tourism Instagram handle and slogan used on tourism marketing materials. As people use the bag, they are actively promoting the Whitby tourism brand while encouraging others to engage with our social media.  

 The bag is tied directly to two tourism promotional products, the Food Guide, and the Food Tours. Since the bags were issued to all participants on the Food Tours, drivers and pedestrians who observed the tours would see a large group of people carrying the bag and it would garner interest in the Food Tours. Observers would actively stop tour group participants and ask what was happening as they saw a large group of people carrying the same promotional material. The bag also afforded the opportunity to provide participants with additional tourism materials like Whitby Food Guide postcards or prizes which further promoted Whitby as a must visit destination.  

 In addition to the food tours, the bags were also issued to participants of the Mayor’s Golf fundraiser. In total, over 550 individuals received the tote bag, meaning that there are 500 people actively promoting the Explore Whitby brand while they shop or stroll in the community and beyond.  

 The bag is a sustainable product. Produced by local Whitby business Monster Teamwear, the company encourages people to be mindful and “reuse, reuse, reuse”. The use of reusable cloth bags helps limit the number of plastic bags overall and hiring a local company for production meant less strain on the environment in terms of drive time and product delivery as the company delivered the product directly to the Town.  

The bag continues to be used as a tourism promotional product for tourism events and initiatives like the Food Tours continuously inspiring people to explore Whitby.