The Sweet Service Award goes to Four & Twenty Café, and its co-owner Marijke Duminy, for preparing a special portion of their home-made mayonnaise for me on Heritage Day. I am a huge fan of their home-made mustard and mayonnaise, but there was no mayonnaise in their product fridge, having always been available when I have stopped there in the past. Marijke made up a portion of the mayonnaise, despite it not being on her do list.
The Sour Service Award goes to Woolworths. For Heritage Day on Tuesday, more commonly known as National Braai Day, Woolworths went to town in linking itself to this special day of celebration, advertising with a wrap-around of the latest Sunday Times as well as of the Monday edition of The Times. Both the wrap-arounds were ‘Love Local‘ themed, emphasising ‘The Best of Local’, and featuring Jan Braai (‘Head of National Braai Day Initiative’), MasterChef Judge and Tsogo Sun Chef Benny Masekwameng, and MasterChef SA Judge and Chef Pete Goffe-Wood (his Kitchen Cowboys business even mentioned). It featured three One Off branded Woolworths local wines. In addition, Woolworths did a knock and drop in postboxes of a high quality fold-open mouthwatering Braai-inspired brochure, with two themes: ‘Our SA Road Trip‘ on one side and ‘Our Texas Road Trip‘ on the other side. Given the Proudly South African nature of 24 September, one wonders what led Woolworths to focus half of its space on the USA, not suiting the spirit of Heritage Day/National Braai Day. Even worse, on the South African side, it has a South African flag and ‘love LOCAL‘ flash, yet 15 cm further down it has three Chilean wines, no South African wines being featured at all, the ad encouraging readers: ‘Add a little Chile to your drinks trolley. Hot days and cold nights have given our new range of Chilean wines their depth of colour, vibrant, fruit and crisp freshness, perfect for the SA palate‘! On the American side the Barbeque recommendations are paired with Bavaria beer! On Wednesday, Woolworths sent an e-mail, encouraging one to buy more meats and other foods for more braais! Ultimately one wonders why Woolworths invested so heavily in promoting its Braai-related products for a one day public holiday – could it be because of Pick ‘n Pay’s dominant sponsorship of The Ultimate Braai Master, its Season 2 having just been fired up?!
The WhaleTales Sweet & Sour Service Awards are presented every Friday on the WhaleTales blog. Nominations for the Sweet and Sour Service Awards can be sent to Chris von Ulmenstein at whalecot@iafrica.com. Past winners of the Sweet and Sour Service Awards can be read on the Friday posts of this blog, and in the WhaleTales newsletters on the www.whalecottage.com website.
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