My ‘source‘ has kindly provided us with the following information issued by the HP Foods Marketing Department.

HP Foods has just announced a new “Save The Proper British Cafe” promotion in support of the British Cafe. This promotion follows last years hugely successful “Jimmy Brown” and “Paul Smith Limited Edition Bottle” campaigns.

The “Save The Proper British Cafe” campaign featuring the HP Sauce brand is now underway in the United Kingdom and has already picked up television coverage on BBC, ITV and Sky TV and on national radio on Radio 4, Radio 5 and Talksport. The HP Sauce brand is also making appearances in various British national newspapers including the Sun, Daily Telegraph, Daily Express, Daily Mirror, Daily Mail and the Daily Star.

A new campaign website which features an online petition to support the British Cafe has been established at www.proper-british.co.uk and is reported to have already been inundated with visitors signing the petition. Be sure to visit the campaign website and register your support!

So put down that latte and support the Proper British Cafe!

This week our Australian correspondent Karen K updates us on an HP Sauce promotional campaign which recently ran in Australia. This promotion featured tags affixed to the tops of HP Sauce bottles to help entice people to try out HP with some tasty “Sizzling Summer Recipes” when grocery shopping. (Hey, it’d work for me! ;-)) Summer may be over in Oz now, but here in Canada we’re just warming up so the timing is perfect. Thanks Karen! *Don’t feel too bad for our Aussie friends - I’m told it doesn’t get much cooler than 15C there. Still perfect BBQ weather in my books!

These official HP Sauce recipes look fantastic and I can’t wait to try them out myself. The recipes are:

• HP Deluxe Marinated Steak
• HP Grilled Chicken Sandwich

Both recipes have been added to the Recipes section. Be sure to try out the others while you’re there!

If you have your own HP Sauce recipes or if you’ve tried some of the recipes on the site and you’d like to share your enthusiasm - by all means contact us!

Update: Mandy has kindly contributed some additional promotional images for this and the previous “Warming Winter Recipes” advertising campaign. I’ve placed them into a new gallery within the HP Sauce Advertising Gallery and the existing advertising images are now in their own “Print Advertising” sub gallery. Thanks Mandy!

Those who know me will tell you that my absolute favourite television show is Coronation Street. I’m a long time fan of the show and I’ve followed it steadily since the the mid ’90s. When www.brownsauce.org first came about, I started to look to Corrie (as we fans call it) for glimpses of our favourite sauce having made its way into the daily lives of the people of Weatherfield. I thought this sauce - so embedded into the British lifestyle would be easy to spot. I was wrong!?

On the show, one can occasionally spot a bottle of the brown stuff on a kitchen table or at Roys Rolls. The bottles are often obscured (purposefully no doubt) or they’ll take the form of a generic brown squeeze bottle. Who do they think they’re fooling anyway? And while brown sauce does play a part of the show, it remains in the background and is only very rarely addressed directly. That is until now.

This past weekend, an episode of Coronation Street featured brown sauce front & center along with the two regular characters Leanne & Danny as they sit munching on toast having just spent the night together in a hotel. And while this site most certainly does not endorse the relationship brewing between Leanne & Danny, the conversation which results between these two is quite healthy indeed…

My personal thoughts on this are that the Coronation Street exectutives should partner with HP Foods to bring out HP Sauce into the open on the show. Afterall, there are few things more British than good old Coronation Street & HP Sauce!

*My appologies to those who will find this old news. Coronation Street airs some 9 months behind here in Canada. Please don’t write me with spoilers to the show!