Macao special Plan uses gourmet dining to turn tables on roulette
Student teams harness Macao’s unique cuisine to interest high-rollers
University students from Zhuhai and Macao are trying to revive Macao’s slumping tourist industry by appealing to visitors’ taste buds, bringing the flavor and aroma of gourmet dining into cleverly designed marketing presentations.
It’s all about tasting “a bite of Macao”.
The challenge lies in how to come up with promotional ideas to shift world travelers’ attention from Macao’s casinos to its distinctive cuisines.
“A bite of Macao” may mean biting into the super-crispy pork chop bun, or burying the tip of the tongue in the soft interior of a Portuguese egg tart, or even something as simple as an egg roll.
The cuisine idea came after a reported slump in Macao’s once-thriving gambling business. Macao’s Gaming Inspection and Coordination Bureau said the city ’s casino business had fallen 38 percent over the past three years. Casino revenue growth in January fell short of analysts’ estimates.
High rollers gave Macao a boost during the Spring Festival but punters are in short supply and business is in the doldrums.
Noticing the trend, Macao’s government is seeking to give the special administrative region “a city of gastronomy” status in the United Nations’ Creative Cities Network, under the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).
UNESCO currently identifies two mainland cities among the 18 “cities of gastronomy” worldwide. They are Chengdu in Sichuan province — cradle of the province’s spicy cuisine — and Shunde in Guangdong province, with its distinctive Cantonese cuisine.
Organized by the Asia-Pacific Communication Exchange Association (APCEA), a Macaobased academic group, the Seventh APCEA Business Presentation Contest (ABPC) brought together six grand finalists chosen from 15 original student teams from Zhuhai and Macao. They competed for the same goal — to make people hungry for Macao.
The Seventh ABPC had the attraction of blended Cantonese cuisine and Portuguese gourmet fare as its theme.
“It is commonly known that people come to Macao for casinos, not for the food,” said Peter Jakubowicz, a senior college tutor at Chung Chi College of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, one of the judges of ABPC.
The government was putting a lot of effort into tourism promotion, Jakubowicz added.
After a two-round contest, the team “V-topia” from the Beijing Institute of Technology, Zhuhai Campus, won the first prize. The team presented a “Cuisine Marathon” plan, in which all participants would visit designated food stores to complete specific missions, like baking an egg tart, using a “gourmet passport” provided by the event sponsor.
Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Business Administration from the University of Macau Javier Calero Cuervo, another ABPC judge, said the panel awarded the first prize to “V-topia” for its “creativity, fea- sibility and overall planning”.
The proposals also were judged on presentation skills, such as voice, pacing and eye contact. Cuervo said he was impressed by the improvement in English language skills among students.
The team “Viva la Vida” from Macau University of Science and Technology won the prize for Best Business Plan with a promotional theme focusing on a food experience workshop. The team “Elite” from Institute for Tourism Studies, Macao — which created a project named “Colorful Macao” — won the prize for visual creativity.
“The contest broadened our horizons. We met people and had dozens of experiences. New people always bring us new inspiration,” said Guan Jianshi, the winner of the most popular speaker prize, from Beijing Institute of Technology, Zhuhai Campus.
Guan said she learned how to work as part of a team preparing for the match. She said her team had some tough challenges during the planning process. “But the difficulty made it necessary for us to compromise and cope with different mindsets and problem-solving methods.”
APCEA, comprising a group of academics in the Asia-Pacific region, aims to offer a portal to promote academic exchange and collaboration in the areas of communication, education, language studies and business management.
In l i n e w i t h i t s o r i g i n a l vision, the ABPC, sponsored by Macao Foundation, now in its seventh year, aims to enhance students’ professionalism in presenting business plans in English. With a growing influence in the Southeast Asian region over the years, the English-language business contest has become a well-known brand in Macao.