Blue Chi’s

Origin Oman is a campaign run by PEIE that is meant to promote local Omani products and services and to creative awareness of the quality of these local products and services. It is the new version of the old “The Omani Product is Our First Choice” – ( المنتج العماني -اختيارنا الأول ) campaign. PEIE made a student competition to design the logo and Haitham Al Busafi won.

His logo concept was of the word “Omani” in Arabic written as a spiral. His draft was selected by PEIE as the winning logo and then he was taken to Dubai to work with international branding agency Landor to guide him on how to transform his concept into the logo you see above. The logo is an outward growing spiral that tells is meant to resemeble the growth and expansion of Omani products and services. It is nice, simple, and smartly drawn.

The video below was shown at the launch event of the logo earlier this week.

The Origin Oman logo will be used in all qualifying Omani products and services just like the Omani Product logo we see on locally made products.

I think that the best thing about the Origin Oman logo is that it was made by someone Omani.

PEIE is organising a very interesting campaign for promoting local Omani products in the format of a dinner event to be held at the Oman Tourism College where all the food served will not have any ingredients that have traveled more than 150 kilometers from their direct source to get to the college.

‘Food-Miles’ is such a cool concept, I have never though about how much distance a meal I’m eating has traveled to come to my dish. If you think about it, the shorter the distance an ingredient travels, the fresher it is. I have no idea how the Oman Tourism College will manage to do it, 150KM will mean that even ingredients from Sohar will not qualify, I assume that the dinner will mostly be sea food as the sea is probably less than 2KM away from the college.

I did try their food at the eGames Conference and it was not bad at all. This event is free of charge, so I might as well just go for the sake of the free meal! (And to support local products of course! )

The Origin Oman 150KM will be held on the evenings of the 25th and 26th of May. You can get your invitation by emailing hamida.albalushi@peie.om (we are NOT related).

I think that as Oman opens up to foreign investment and as our country concludes more and more free trade agreements, local business will have a hard time surviving the fierce competition, so we do need to support and promote local products. The Origin Oman campaign aims to do that by organising various events, some for the public to make them aware of good local products and service, some of Omani business to help them raise their standards.

PS. PEIE is also holding an RO 500 competition for students to design the Origin Oman logo, make sure you check it out if you are interested.