We Put a Caravan Full of Bulgarian Roses in the Centre of Sofia. Here’s What We Learned.

On product tourism, sensory design, VR rose fields, and what happens when the curriculum walks out of the classroom and into the city.

There is a question we ask at the start of every training session on hospitality and tourism:

“What is the most valuable thing your region produces — and does a single visitor know that before they leave?”

Most of the time, the answer to the second part is no. Not because the producers don’t care. Not because the story isn’t there. But because no one has built the bridge between what exists in the field and what a visitor actually experiences in the city.

We spent the last two years building a training programme to change that. And then, this June, we took it outside.

What we teach — and where it comes from

HRC Culinary Academy runs an integrated institution: a professional culinary school, a working training restaurant, and hotel operations under one roof in Sofia. That structure is not administrative convenience. It is a teaching philosophy.

The argument is simple: most hospitality businesses are very good at delivering services. A room, a meal, a transfer. What they struggle with is designing experiences — moments that carry a story, engage the senses, and create the kind of memory that brings people back and sends them off to recommend you to someone else.

Everything we teach is built on the premise that these skills can be learned, practised, and applied by any HORECA professional – not just the large chains with design budgets, but the guesthouse owner, the independent restaurant, the local food tour operator.

Restaurant Talents, our working training restaurant, currently serves a menu called “Aromas Beyond Borders.” Every dish is built around a specific scent chosen by the head chef. Every serving comes with a personal story. This is not a concept or a pilot. It is the live menu.

When we ask a restaurateur to design the sensory layer of their guest experience, we can show them exactly what that looks like in practice. That’s where the methodology comes from.

Then Rosey’s Mark walked into our classroom

Earlier this year, we invited a specialist from Rosey’s Mark – a Bulgarian family brand dedicated to edible products from Rosa Damascena, the Bulgarian oil-bearing rose — to run a guest session with our culinary students.

It was one of the best sessions we have run.

The format was straightforward: an introduction to the origin story of the Bulgarian rose, a structured tasting of five products in order of sensory intensity, and then three recipe stations — a rose jam salad dressing, an Oriental milk pudding with rose water (Muhalabieh), and a rose-infused cream cheese for sourdough toast.

But every element of that session was a live demonstration of what we teach:

→  The recipe descriptions were written in a narrative format connecting origin, technique, and meaning — WHO grew the rose, WHAT makes it special, WHEN it is harvested, WHERE it comes from, WHY it matters, and the AROMA that defines it.

→  The tasting sequence was a sensory design exercise — five products, five techniques, deliberately ordered by intensity.

→  The presence of a producer in the room, talking about their supply chain, their harvest season, and their family mission, was product tourism in real time.

Students cooked the recipes. They tasted each other’s work. They wrote one-sentence descriptions of each dish. And when the session ended, several of them told us it was the first time they had understood what “product tourism” actually means in practice.

Understanding it in a kitchen classroom is one thing. Seeing it at city scale is another.

So we took it into the city

In June 2025, Rosey’s Mark and HRC Culinary Academy co-created the Bulgarian Rose Pop-Up Experience – three days in Sofia’s City Garden, next to the National Theatre Ivan Vazov, free and open to the public.

A converted caravan. A tasting menu. A VR experience. And a lot of conversations we did not entirely expect.

The tasting menu was developed by our chef instructors specifically for the event – five items, each demonstrating a different culinary application of the rose: green salad with rose jam dressing; sea bass ceviche with fresh vegetables, pea puree and tigre de leche with rose water; homemade ‘banichki’ with roses – the typical Bulgarian patties in a themed variation with cow’s cheese, rosemary and rose jam, a sparkling rose soda, homemade-style rose lemonades; and a mille-feuille with roses and strawberries. Every item came with a story card. Not a label. A story.

Every item came with a story card. Not a label. A story.

The VR component is the part people keep talking about. A professional crew had filmed 360° content in the Kazanlak Rose Valley during the May harvest season. Visitors in the middle of Sofia put on headsets and stood in rose fields at dawn, surrounded by the ambient sound of the harvest, watching petals fall. When they took the headsets off, the rose products in front of them were not souvenirs anymore.

A visitor who has stood in a virtual rose field and smelled the scent of actual rose petals is not buying rose jam. They are buying their way back into that memory.

The human element was Rosey’s Mark founders Rositsa Paunova-Dlagnekova and Ina Abadjiyeva, present throughout, connecting every taste and image to the story of their brand. In their words: “Our mission has always been to show that the Bulgarian rose can be not just a symbol of our country, but part of contemporary gastronomy and culture. We wanted to bring the magic of the Rose Valley to the centre of Sofia.”

What we actually learned

We went in with clear goals. We came out with a few things we did not anticipate.

The VR does something a classroom cannot. The Kazanlak Rose Valley is 200 kilometres from Sofia. The harvest lasts three weeks. For most city visitors, it might as well be on another planet. The 360° film collapsed that distance in four minutes. People took the headsets off differently — quieter, more curious, more likely to ask a real question rather than reach for their phone. Technology as a storytelling tool, not an entertainment device.

The story card changed how people ate. We watched this happen repeatedly. Visitors who received a dish without context ate it and moved on. Visitors who read the story card first — who knew the rose came from Kazanlak, was harvested in May, and had never been used in this way before — ate the same dish more slowly, asked more questions, and stayed longer. The narrative did not change the taste. It changed the experience.

The model is more transferable than we expected. A caravan. A local producer. A tasting sequence with story cards. An immersive media element that brings the production site to the visitor. A host who knows the story by heart. We watched this structure work with hundreds of visitors who had no prior connection to the rose. The same model works for any local ingredient — lavender, saffron, aged cheese, smoked paprika, forest honey — with any producer who has a real story to tell.

The structure is the same. The story changes.

Why this matters for what we teach

The most powerful thing we can show a professional we are training is not a slide or a diagram. It is a real example of the thing we are asking them to build.

The Bulgarian Rose Pop-Up Experience is now that example. We can show participants the tasting menu and the story cards. We can describe the VR experience and why it worked. We can walk through the visitor journey touchpoint by touchpoint, and we can say honestly: we built this, we tested it with real visitors, and here is what happened.

That changes the quality of the conversation in the room.

The Bulgarian rose is not a souvenir. It is a contemporary culinary ingredient, a cultural heritage object, and an immersive sensory world. We teach HORECA professionals to look at their own local ingredients in exactly the same way.

The rose valley is 200 kilometres from Sofia. After this event, for some visitors, it felt considerably closer. That is the job.

Rosey’s Mark: roseysmark.eu  ·  roseysmark.com