Promoting Traditional Cuisine as a Cultural Tourism Product: A Local Community’s Involvement Approach

The potential of a destination to offer distinct local foods influences its image and brand, which in turn results in attracting tourists. In addition, it can be considered a tool to promote a given destination. From a sustainable perspective, culinary tourism provides local communities with a range of opportunities for growth in economic, sociocultural, and even ecological dimensions. Local community involvement is essential in any process involving the promotion of local tourism products; therefore, the importance of local community participation is emphasized in this study. To this end, the current study aims to determine how a community can be involved in promoting cuisine as a cultural tourism product. Adopting a qualitative approach, this research applied interviews as a tool to gather the required data. The city of Rasht in Iran was designated as the study area. The study population was specialists and academics in tourism marketing, officials in tourism-related institutions responsible for local tourism development, chefs, and locals working in the local cuisine sector. A content analysis was performed, leading to the extraction of nine main themes, including community-led creative promotional efforts, continuity and preservation of the position by local people, empowering the local community, sustainable development of food tourism emphasizing community involvement, the government’s support and providing the required infrastructure, building and maintaining the brand, advertising effort, supply and sale, and research and development.