Kokova Magazine

Organisers of Taste Cumbria, the annual festival which celebrates the region's very best food and drink, today announced that Booths supermarkets are the latest company to be involved with this year's event.

The weekend-long event, which returns to Cockermouth on September 24 and 25, will see the popular family-run retailer present their extensive product range on the town’s Main Street in a unique 'pop-up' shopping experience.

At the heart of their activity Booths, which has 26 stores in Cumbria, Lancashire, Yorkshire and Cheshire, will showcase a range of products to try and buy, focusing on food matching, utilising regional products that complement each other.

Booths own highly-trained specialists will be attending to guide festival-goers, who will be able to sample a variety of cheeses and wine, discovering how different foods can be used to enhance the taste of others, as well as using beer and sausages to get the tasty message home, which they anticipate will be hugely popular.

In addition to the pop-up activity, Booths will be holding light-hearted competitions for Cumbrian foodies including a trial in 'How well do you know your cheese?' which aims to discover who knows their Wensleydale from their Cheshire White.

Foodies who enter the competition will blind taste four different cheeses and have to identify each in turn for the chance to win £100 trolley-dash in Booths new store at Penrith ' which will open in November.

Booths will be attending the Taste Cumbria event and offering food lovers a chance to show that they know their cheeses. We will be running a fun competition where people can try some of the fabulous cheeses sourced in Booths Country, and have the chance to win a fantastic prize.

We'll also be giving people the chance to try some of the wide range of local produce that they can find in Booths stores.

Booths is proud to work closely with many of the region’s best local producers and we’re are thoroughly looking forward to taking part in Taste Cumbria and showing off some of these products in this wonderful part of Booths Country.

Richard Sykes, the manager of Booths' new Penrith store

Booths will also be running beginners' courses in wine tasting and beer tasting throughout the festival.

Younger visitors can put their skills to the test in a special Creative Corner where they can design a Booths poster.

Now only a matter of days away, Taste Cumbria Food Festival which attracted over 17,000 visitors last year, is billed as the perfect weekend event for anyone with an interest in regional food and drink, and local food advocates Booths have played a valuable part in promoting the event through their 26 stores spread across four North West counties - distributing leaflets to customers and displaying festival banners over the last four weeks.

This is the second Taste Cumbria Food Festival to be hosted by the town and numerous venues throughout Cockermouth will be putting on events and activities during festival weekend, from masterclasses and presentations by Cumbrian cooks to an impressive line-up of Celebrity Chefs including Matt Tebbutt, Tom Kitchin, Stefan Gates and headliners, The Hairy Bikers.

Tickets to the festival and all the Celebrity Chef Demonstrations are available now from the official festival website www.tastecumbria.com and a full calendar of festival events will be available to download in early September.

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Taste Cumbria is funded by the Rural Development Programme for England (RDPE) funded by Defra and the EU. The festival is organised and managed by Cumbria Tourism and SK Events.

Booths is currently recruiting general assistants and specialists for its Penrith store. For more information on how to apply, and to find out more about Booths, please visit www.booths.co.uk