EIT Food at Hapje Tapje Food Festival

EIT Food West and FoodUnfolded join forces at Leuven's Hapje Tapje Food Festival, on Sunday 6th August. 

Known as Belgium’s oldest street food festival, Hapje Tapje attracts around 60,000 food lovers each summer; offering festival goers a chance to taste a wide variety of high-quality food and drink by local restaurants and producers.

Regular at the annual event, CLC West is teaming up with FoodUnfolded this year, to create a tasty experience, paired with an engaging and educational dimension, entirely based on the subject of algae. 

From a booth inspired by these underwater organisms to algae-based dishes, drinks and sweets, to interactive games and prizes that aim to build awareness around the environmental and health benefits of algae, this joint effort by CLC West and FoodUnfolded, is bound to catch everyone's attention, while addressing the key findings outlined on the consumer perception research on algae, carried by the EIT Food’s consumer observatory.

Creating an opportunity for consumers to try algae, CLC West collaborates with sustainable and innovative chef and passionate foodie Jelbrich Hendrickx, who has designed an algae-based food and drink menu, for the event. The culinary offer for the day includes Puffed celeriac (including miso kombu), Chocolate “pulpo" (with wakame mousse), Seaweed cocktail (with kelp), Seaweed "Ice Tea” (with wakame). The algae gastronomic experience will be completed by ZUUT. The young and dynamic team behind this innovative patisserie-chocolaterie, will be elaborating limited edition chocolates based on algae, for the event. 

With the mission of building awareness around algae, emphasizing their nutritional properties, educating on the environmental benefits with back up claims and encouraging consumers to incorporate algae in their diets, FoodUnfolded will be completing the experience with a series of engaging games, challenges, quizzes and give away prizes. The activities taking place at Hapje Tapje fit into an overall content campaign about the subject of algae, designed by FoodUnfolded, to be launched on the multimedia platform in September. This content campaign will include editorial pieces, video, a social media campaign and events; and draws from the findings outlined by the consumer research study carried by the Consumer Observatory.

This year’s Hapje Tapje will also be looking for the “Dish of the Future”, a prize launched by the Town Hall, CLC West and FoodUnfolded, looking to award the best dish by local restaurants, fulfilling the criteria of: sustainable, innovative and delicious. Jelbrich Hendrickx, sustainable and innovative chef for CLC West and Sofia Kuhn, representing FoodUnfolded, will be deliberating which dish best represents the future and the winner will be announced at the booth of EIT Food around 4 pm.