Slow Food Anglia festival Colchester September 2016

Our second dedicated Slow Food Anglia festival will be held on the 3^rd and 4^th of September and will again be held in the lovely Lower Castle Park in Colchester, and as before all our members are invited to take part in the festival, and this includes the opportunity of taking a stand in the special Slow Food Marquee that we will have again this year. The festival will start at 10.30am on each of the days and finish around 5pm and Slow Food members and other businesses taking part can set up either the evening before or early on the Saturday morning. There is free parking available all day close by in another area of the park only a 5 minute walk from the main site.

Last year was the first year that we held the Slow Food Anglia Festival in Essex and there were over 60 stands present including producers from across the Anglian region as well as Slow Food members and producers from Italy. Over the two days there were in excess of 7,000 visitors and this year we are hoping for at least 10,000 now that the festival is more well known in the area. At this years festival we are planning on having up to 80 stands at the park and we have already found a high demand from local Anglian food businesses wanting to take part in the festival to showcase their superb local produce. Slow Food festivals in East Anglia are now increasingly popular with both producers and the public, our festival to be held in Norwich on August 19th and 20th has attracted a lot of attention including radio and TV interviews in that city.

Slow Food as an organisation both in East Anglia and all across the UK believes in promoting and supporting good, clean, healthy food produced where possible in a sustainable way and we in Slow Food Anglia together with Slow Food Norwich and England think that holding food festivals as well as other local events are one of the ways to get this message across to the wider public. our festival are much more than just places for producers to sell to the public, we believe that there should be a strong educational element  involved so we always aim to have workshops, demonstrations and talks and at the festival in September we will have workshops on wild foods and foraging, making artisan beers, talks from local East Anglian producers and also some Italian food producers from Slow Food in Italy.
As well as many of the stands we had at last years festival this year there are some producers new to our September festival including an artisan English Vodka producer, a small Essex based company that sells bulk Italian wine, a chilli business from north Norfolk and Claudio Bincoletto a professional forager and consultant on wild foods for the RHS. 

We were very pleased at the festival last year to have an Italian chef and several Slow Food members from Slow Food Marche in the east of Italy, and also the Sicilian food company Tasting Sicily
representing Sicilian Slow Food producers with their wide range of excellent Sicilian produce. Slow Food Marche president Ugo Pazzi will be back again this year with another Slow Food Marche stand and we have also been in touch with the Slow Food group in Imola, Italy, as Colchester and Imola are Twinned towns but because of other commitments the group from Imola are unable to take part at the festival this year but will be sending some of their fantastic regional produce and literature. 
At the Colchester festival Slow Food Anglia will also be promoting their part in the first Slow Food Mediterranean conference in Malta to be held in October together with Slow Food Malta and Slow Food Sicilia, and we hope this will prove popular with visitors.
We are looking forward to another successful and popular Colchester festival and if you are interested in taking part as a producer or just wish for more information on the event then please do contact us at info@slowfoodanglia.org