Canadian beef featured on new reality show

Canadian beef takes centre stage on a new reality television show that pits culinary students against one another to create plated dishes from ingredients contained in mystery food baskets.

Pressure Cooker is shot on location at Niagara College’s Culinary Institute in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario and each episode features a series of cooking round using Canadian foodstuffs.

The Beef Information Centre (BIC) is a major sponsor of the show, and Canadian beef is being used in each of the nine regular episodes of the series. In addition, beef will be featured as one of the final cooking round challenges during the final episode.
During the show, trivia questions are posed to viewers, who then have the opportunity to visit the Pressure Cooker website (www.thepressurecooker.tv) to learn more about BIC and Canadian beef.

For BIC, the opportunity to put the focus on Canadian beef in all its goodness each week is a huge plus.

“Not including on-air trivia beef questions, Canadian beef will receive 70 to 120 minutes of national screen time,” notes Heather Travis, BIC’s public relations manager. “This is a great way for us to promote the healthfulness and goodness of Canadian beef to a large audience.”

The Pressure Cooker website features the BIC logo that, when clicked, links to the BIC consumer website, where people can access information about buying and cooking beef, and learn more about its positive nutritive value.

When the reality series wraps up, BIC will received digitized video clips of the 12 sponsored rounds (6-10 minutes per round) to feature on BIC’s website for promotions or to circulate to clients, users, associate members, etc. online. BIC will also have the rights to use the ‘Pressure Cooker’ logo on its website, “…as seen on Pressure Cooker.”

“The Pressure Cooker TV website had over 220,000 hits in the first nine days of the program, which translates into approximately 1,000 visitors,” says Travis. “And the show is close to achieving a cumulative audience in Canada of 350,000 plus households.
The show consists of 16 male and female cooking students from across Canada who are locked down in a fully-equipped teaching kitchen complex at the Niagara College Culinary Institute. Each one-hour episode is a ‘match’ consisting of a frantic series of cooking ‘rounds’. Three executive chefs judge their creations out of a possible 100 points. Bonus marks are awarded by VQA vintners and winemakers to those competitors who can pair the right wine with their dish.

Pressure Cooker airs on SUN TV every Sunday night from 10 to 11 p.m., and on MEN TV on Tuesdays at 7 a.m., 12 noon and 7 p.m.