Local Food Week Social Media Campaign

Agriculture is the top goods producing industry and one of the leading economic drivers in Durham Region. There exists significant opportunity for growth since we are the biggest agricultural producing region in the GTA. This gives our farms and local food producers an advantage to grow their business and feed our urban markets. This campaign was created to capitalize on the opportunity and help grow our region’s agri-food businesses.

The purpose of the multi-channel Local Food Week campaign was to encourage community members to shop local for farm fresh foods, and to raise public awareness around the food that is produced in our region. The campaign took place from June 6-10, 2022. The campaign was delivered collaboratively both with internal teams and external partners. Internally, social media was published through Invest Durham – Rural and Agriculture Twitter, as well as Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook and Instagram (Invest Durham and Durham Tourism) and Regional Corporate accounts as well, ensuring wide distribution of the message. Additional partners externally included our local area municipalities and Durham Farm Fresh.

To gather support from our partners in promoting Local Food Week, we created a campaign cheat sheet for local economic development partners to use. The package included an outline of the campaign and its purpose, pre-drafted social media content, suggested links, hashtags, and farm/food facts specific to each community. Each partner was encouraged to re-share Regional social media content in addition to using the custom content we provided. This project represented an ideal opportunity to promote local food region wide and work collaboratively with all 8 municipalities.

The content used the #LoveONTFood hashtag, we tagged our partners in the posts, and shared links to our Local Food Directory and Local Food Week blog posts.

Local food week blog post 1 – created in 2021, this blog post was updated and re-used for 2022. (475 views)

Local food week blog post 2 – new for 2022, this blog post highlighted farmers’ markets. (59 views)

A banner showcasing Local Food Week and linking to the Invest Durham local food directory was added to the homepage of our regional website (durham.ca). This helped to drive traffic to the local food page and demonstrates the region’s support for the agri-food industry.

The Local Food Directory was created in March 2020 as a centralized resource for finding local food in the region. The webpage and blog posts have been a huge success achieving 18,630 unique views combined.