Receiving Google Alerts about a wide range of topics, we came across one of the strangest links, for South African Fruit, but which looks like it has been designed to market South Africa as a tourism destination, associating different fruits with beautiful top South African destinations!
While the SA Tourism logo is liberally used on the South African Fruit website, the Contact page leads one to Hortgro in Paarl, its pay-off line being ‘supporting the horticultural industry‘. Its members are Dried Fruit Technical Services, South African Stone Fruit Producers’ Association, and the South African Apple and Pear Producers’ Association. Affiliated members of Hortgro are The Pomegranate Association of South Africa, South African Olive Industry Association, South African Honeybush Tea Association, South African Bee Industry Association, and South African Fruit and Vegetable Canners’ Association.
The South African Fruit website focuses only on the Stone Fruit, and the Apple and Pear Producers associations’ products, featuring apples, pears, plums, nectarines and peaches, and appears to focus on marketing our local fruit in the UK. Using the headline ‘South Africa: Beautiful Country, Beautiful Fruit’, different pages show a child holding one of the fruits, with 
an iconic view in the background. For example, the view onto Lion’s Head and Cape Town from Table Mountain is linked to an apple; the view of Table Mountain from Bloubergstrand is linked to a plum; the Drakensberg is paired with a pear; and an unknown destination is associated with a nectarine. Each photograph is SA Tourism branded.
The South African Fruit website also features Reuben ‘Robertsons’ Riffel, who endorses South African Fruit, and has developed a number of recipes for each for the four fruit types. The site also contains a promotional page, and entries are invited for the development of a South African menu by student chefs or chefs under the age of 25, the prize being to spend one week in the kitchen of Chef Margot Janse of Le Quartier Français’ ‘The Tasting Rooms’ (sic) in Franschhoek! Continue reading →
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