THE INFLUENCE OF CULINARY PRODUCT UNIQUENESS ON TOURISTS’ FOOD PREFERENCES
Keywords:
Culinary Tourism, Culinary Product Uniqueness, Tourists’ Food Preferences, Local Food, Food Authenticity, Gastronomic Experience, Destination Attractiveness.Abstract
Culinary tourism has become an important component of the contemporary tourism experience, as tourists increasingly seek authentic, memorable, and distinctive food experiences at destinations. This study examines the influence of culinary product uniqueness on tourists’ food preferences. Culinary product uniqueness refers to the distinctive characteristics of local food, including traditional ingredients, unique flavors, indigenous preparation techniques, cultural authenticity, attractive presentation, and regional identity. The study focuses on how these characteristics shape tourists’ willingness to select, consume, and recommend local culinary products. A quantitative research approach with a cross-sectional survey design is proposed for collecting data from tourists who have experienced local or traditional foods at tourism destinations. The study considers culinary uniqueness as the independent variable and tourists’ food preferences as the dependent variable. Data can be analyzed through descriptive statistics, reliability analysis, correlation, and regression analysis. The study is expected to demonstrate that distinctive culinary characteristics can positively influence tourists’ food preferences by creating novelty, cultural connection, sensory satisfaction, and memorable experiences. The findings may provide useful implications for restaurants, local food producers, tourism organizations, and destination marketers seeking to strengthen culinary tourism and promote regional food products. The study concludes that developing authentic and distinctive culinary products, while maintaining taste, quality, hygiene, and cultural integrity, can contribute to tourists’ positive food experiences and destination attractiveness.References
Abbasi, A. Z., Fayyaz, M. S., Ting, D. H., Munir, M., Bashir, S., & Zhang, C. (2023). The moderating role of complaint handling on brand hate in the cancel culture. Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Administration, 15(1), 46-71.
Fatima, S. A., un Nisa, M., Sarwar, A., Khalique, M. A., Arsalan, Z., Noor, S., ... & Abid, H. M. U. (2025). Hepatoprotective Effect of Myrtus Communis in Carbon Tetrachloride-Induced Hepatic Injury in Animal Model. Pak-Euro Journal of Medical and Life Sciences, 8(2), 239-248.
Dechakul, M., & Monpanthong, P. (2024). Decision Making on Participating in Phuket’s Gastronomic Tourism: Evidence from European Tourists. Rajapark Journal, 18(59), 523-538.
Kovalenko, S., Kovalenko, S., Kutsenko, A., Godlevskyi, M., Severin, V., & Kovalenko, A. (2024, October). Methodology for Creating Annotated Datasets of Biological Objects in Microscopic Images. In 2024 IEEE 5th KhPI Week on Advanced Technology (KhPIWeek) (pp. 1-6). IEEE.
Moreno-Lobato, A. (2026). Emotional and behavioural outcomes of the application of sensory elements in the development of memorable tourism experiences. European Journal of Tourism Research, 43, 1-5.
Rachmawati, R., Hidayati, I. N., & Suprayogi, S. (2025). Resilient city and flood disaster mitigation adaptation community-based in Samarinda City. Journal of Urban Management.Rachmawati, et al. (2025).
.
Wang, X., Zhang, X., Luo, Z., Sun, Q., Cui, Y., Wang, J., ... & Wang, Z. (2024). Emu3: Next-token prediction is all you need. arXiv preprint arXiv:2409.18869.
Zhang, Y., Chen, X., Jin, B., Wang, S., Ji, S., Wang, W., & Han, J. (2024, November). A comprehensive survey of scientific large language models and their applications in scientific discovery. In Proceedings of the 2024 conference on empirical methods in natural language processing (pp. 8783-8817).
