Seafood Scotland has launched an innovation programme to stimulate new seafood tourism initiatives. The pilot will see the trade body work with organisations to explore and support business diversification and to establish new tourism opportunities for the Scottish seafood industry.
The ambition is to inspire seafood organisations to exploit the huge growth in food tourism in Scotland. The programme will encourage Scottish seafood businesses to spread risk by diversifying into new and emerging sectors.
Seafood Scotland is ideally looking for seafood businesses with ideas that will provide an authentic or innovative experience, tell their story as an engaging and immersive experience, answer a question that customers regularly ask, and ultimately increase their revenue.
Selected projects will be championed by a dedicated Seafood Scotland mentor and a hand-picked cohort of leading Scottish business and tourism experts, bespoke to each initiative, to impart specialist advice and guidance to help fast track their idea to fruition.
‘We want to seek out seafood entrepreneurs that have been harbouring a nugget of an idea for business growth within the tourism sector, something that they haven’t had time or resource to explore before now. We will help them make that idea a reality,’ said Seafood Scotland chief executive Donna Fordyce.
‘This programme is designed to help inspire and ignite seafood tourism in Scotland; a market we know has huge potential and should be an area for growth for the Scottish seafood industry.’
Seafood Scotland have created a Tourism Toolkit show casing examples of best practices from Scotland and across the world.
Expected to run for six months, the initiative will provide all business mentoring free of charge to the pilot projects, reducing the financial pressure for the business ideas, ensuring the projects maximum success in diversifying and developing seafood tourism opportunities in Scotland.
Seafood Scotland is reaching out to the seafood industry, local food groups and regional inshore fishery groups across Scotland to hear all ideas for potential seafood tourism projects, no matter how big or small.
Email karen.galloway@seafoodscotland.org to find out more. Enquiries should be submitted by 11th February 2022, and the successful pilots are expected to be announced late February.
