Features, drivers, and outcomes of food tourism

Food is increasingly becoming a central aspect in staging memorable experiences within the tourism and hospitality sector (Kunasegaran et al., 2019; de Albuquerque Meneguel et al., 2019; Cetin et al., 2019), and it is a major motivation for traveling (Okumus et al., 2021; Chang et al., 2020). Food is therefore important for at least three different sets of reasons. First, it can be a major pull factor to a tourism destination (Su et al., 2020) and the major travel motivation as travelers might be attracted by a specific cuisine (Robinson et al., 2018) whose authenticity could depends critically on the place where the food is produced (Kim et al., 2019) and those producing it. Accordingly, the cultural, religious and psychological drivers and motivations of food tourism consumption have been only partially covered by extant literature (e.g. Lai et al., 2019; Yeap et al., 2019) and need to be investigated in more depth by means of empirical studies leveraging both small and big data about travelers and tourists (Mariani et al., 2018; Mariani and Baggio, 2021). Second, while food is certainly about gastronomic products, it is also about processes and about innovation of gastronomic products and processes that rests on knowledge, craftsmanship and traditions (de Albuquerque Meneguel et al., 2019). New cooking techniques, science of cooking and molecular gastronomy gradually inspire daily cooking activities and haute cuisine techniques attract more adventure travelers globally. Increasingly food has been included in tourism services and experiences in an ubiquitous way (McKercher et al., 2008) and in light of the most recent technological advancements in services (Mariani and Borghi, 2019). As such, it is critical to understand what features of food products and production processes are functional for tourism firms to create or co-create with tourists compelling tourism experiences. Third, food tourism is gradually more important for tourism destinations to enhance their competitiveness, economic performance, attractiveness, and for their place/destination marketing (Okumus et al., 2007) and branding (Lai et al., 2018) strategies. As such, the mechanisms that allow food tourism to make a difference in terms of competitiveness and appeal need further investigation as well as factors pertaining to sustainability (Everett and Slocum, 2013). Overall, this Special Issue aimed at shedding more light on the characteristics, drivers and outcomes of food tourism. We particularly welcomed empirical studies addressing a variety of topics in food tourism and adopting qualitative, quantitative and mixed methods. Hopefully, this will be a well-cited issue as food tourism is increasingly covered by major travel, tourism and hospitality journals. This topic is currently covered in a very fragmented way as food tourism research is relatively novel and only around 300 journal articles have been published on the topic scattered across many disciplines. However, what is missing is a collection of cutting hedge research shedding light on the features, drivers and outcomes of food tourism to build an overarching framework around the phenomenon. In this Special Issue, the contributing authors explore the Features, Drivers and Outcomes of Food Tourism and explain how food tourism can help destinations as well as tourism, hospitality and foodservice industries to overcome a number of challenges.