MINI Marmite muncher Effie Robinson likes the savoury spread so much she even took a sandwich with her when she splashed down a water slide while on holiday in France.

And eight-year-old Effie's extreme sandwiching feat, captured on film by her father, has earned the Robinson family from Blashford near Ringwood a £4,000 holiday as top prize in a Marmite promotional competition.

Effie's Marmite-fuelled ecstasy, entitled 'winning smile', was the unanimous choice of the judges who pored over more than 1,000 pictures of people eating sandwiches in extreme locations including underwater, dangling mid-air, climbing up a cliff and even a Gulf war battlefield.

Now Effie, along with parents Simon and Kate and siblings Floyd, 13, George, 11 and Gina, 6, are planning to go to Disney World in Florida next year - and take plenty of her favourite yeast extract spread with them.

Simon, who is a keen amateur photographer when not practising as a dentist at his surgery in Christchurch, will be able to record the family's fun on a new Nikon camera he also won in the competition.

He said: "I had seen the competition advertised on the Nikon website and thought I could do better."

"We were in France and there was a waterslide there. I was standing up to my chest in water trying to keep the camera dry while trying to get the shot of Effie coming down the slide."

"The French thought we were crazy."

Although the product is very much a British institution, Marmite is actually a French word (pronounced mar-meet) for the type of large cooking vessel pictured on the label.

Made from the spent yeast by-product of the brewing industry, Marmite was first produced commercially in 1902 and has been loved - or loathed - ever since by generations.

"Effie loves Marmite and so do most of the family," said Mr Robinson.