Dr. Oetker Stories
Breaking down barriers to baking
Dr. Oetker Türkiye creates a Taste of Home for visually impaired and hard-of-hearing consumers.
Creating a Taste of Home – that's the Dr. Oetker Purpose. And what could be more homey than enjoying the aroma of home-made delicacies at home? Until now, however, not all consumers have had easy access to baking. The Dr. Oetker colleagues in Türkiye wanted to change that.
Dr. Oetker recipe book in Braille
In collaboration with the Turkish Visually Impaired Library (Türkiye Görme Özürlüler Kitaplığı, TÜRGÖK), Dr. Oetker Türkiye broke down barriers by publishing the first Dr. Oetker dessert recipe booklet in Braille. The booklet supports our visually impaired consumers by offering them easy to prepare recipes from home while making our products more accessible.
Tülay Yazgan, Head of TÜRGÖK, shows a blind consumer another recipe book project that Dr. Oetker Türkiye has also contributed among other sponsors; “Good Smells In The Kitchen”
“Our visually impaired consumers are interested in our products. But they needed assistance with reading or learning the instructions.”
Emine Özden Executive Manager Public Relations, Türkiye.
Recipe Instructions for Dr. Oetker Products
With this need in mind, the booklet contains the instructions to prepare 23 Dr. Oetker dessert products such as Gels, Sweet Sauces, Cream Caramel and Turkish specialties such as Aşure, Keşkül and Kazandibi. The team also created audio recordings of the recipes to support individuals who cannot read the braille alphabet. In total, 400 copies of the CDs and booklets were delivered to our consumers to empower them to bake for themselves at home.
Workshop in our Turkish Test Kitchen
To mark the booklet's launch, colleagues ran a workshop in the Dr. Oetker Test Kitchen with consumers. Here, together with our colleagues, they were invited to try out some of our dessert recipes from the recipe booklet with us.
Consumers trying out the recipes.
Take a look at the results of the ‘Good Smells in the Kitchen’ workshop at Dr. Oetker Türkiye.
Videos with sign language
Supporting our deaf and hearing-imaired consumers is also a passion project for us. Employees in Türkiye voluntarily took sign language courses through a local People and Culture initiative to help deaf-and hearing-impaired colleagues. The colleagues who had learned sign language were also asked to appear in our product and recipe preparation videos to help ensure accessibility for our consumers. The videos were later posted to our YouTube channel.
The goal of both initiatives was to break down barriers and to show there are no boundaries while baking. They received a great response from our consumers, which we were delighted to see.