WHILE MANY shoots were cancelled across the UK during lockdown, Great British Game Week served as an opportunity to reach out to a new customer base for the sector's game meat offering.

Taking place between November 23 and 29, The British Game Alliance took the opportunity with more people cooking in their homes, to encourage individuals to get creative with inspiring game dishes and shared details of stockists and recipes online.

The BGA sought the help of some ‘foodie influencers’, well-followed accounts on social media, and saw a huge spike in online engagement with game meat. These ’influencers’, all from outside the traditional game shooting and cooking community, had a combined following of 79,000 people, reaching a brand-new audience with their game recipes, while content on the BGA’s own account was seen by nearly 50,000 people.

Some events were able to take place in revised formats, such as the Cook School’s Virtual Curry Evening, which was a live cooking event on Zoom giving participants the opportunity to cook a game curry along with The Cook School Head Chef Stuart, which was a great success and introduced a number of people to game who had never tried it before.

During the course of this year, many BGA stockists, pubs and restaurants have adapted to offer takeaways, deliveries and meat boxes to continue to serve game to customers at home. This year’s Great British Game Week was a perfect opportunity to encourage new customers to seek out these new ways of sourcing game.

Head of Operations at the BGA, Louisa North, said, “We were blown away to see the levels of engagement online for this year’s Great British Game Week. Our shooting community tends to be very practical, we achieve our conservation and our business successes through physical work in the real world, and sometimes these online successes seem a bit alien and maybe even pointless. But tens and tens of thousands of new people hearing about game, many of them for the first time, is a huge win for shooting," she enthused. "We can’t thank everyone enough for throwing support behind this pivotal celebration in our sector’s calendar. All the businesses finding new ways of bringing game to market and everyone who shared their ideas and their creations from their own kitchens contributed to this success,” she concluded.

For more information or to find a stockist, recipe or further inspiration, visit www.eatwild.co/stockists.