Sunset is marking National Tomato Month with Sunset Certified Tommalier, an October campaign that gives people a playful way to taste tomatoes more deliberately and match them to meals. Created by Sunset, a Mastronardi Produce® brand, it borrows the sommelier idea for produce, teaching consumers to spot differences in sweetness, acidity, and crunch while earning a commemorative certificate.
A guided tomato flight anchors the experience, letting participants compare styles side by side instead of treating every tomato as the same. An Instagram miniseries hosted by Milla Mastronardi also makes the lesson easy to follow at home, turning flavor education into a social activity rather than a niche food exercise.
For shoppers, this means tomato buying can become a more confident choice instead of a guess based on looks alone. It also nudges produce toward prosumerism, giving everyday cooks language they can use when picking tomatoes for specific dishes.
Image Credit: Sunset
Key Themes Behind This Trend
- Produce Prosumer Education
- Consumer-facing taste credentials create room for fresh-food brands to differentiate commodities through deeper flavor literacy and meal-pairing confidence.
- Social Tasting Rituals
- Guided flights and shareable video lessons transform everyday grocery items into participatory experiences that can build community around product discovery.
- Sommelier-inspired Food Marketing
- Borrowing premium tasting frameworks from wine gives produce marketers a distinctive path to elevate perceived value and encourage more intentional purchasing.
Where This Applies
- Fresh Produce
- Flavor-led education can help growers and retailers move beyond appearance-based merchandising toward variety-specific positioning and premium segmentation.
- Grocery Retail
- Interactive tasting campaigns offer supermarkets new ways to turn routine shopping into experiential engagement that supports discovery, loyalty, and basket expansion.
- Social Media Marketing
- Short-form educational content provides food brands with scalable storytelling formats that make product knowledge accessible, entertaining, and highly shareable.
