A recently released report predicts that the culinary tourism market, valued at $1,167 billion in 2019, may reach $1,796.5 billion by 2027.
This kind of tourism generally involves “exploration or travel to remote exotic areas and indulge in consumption of various dishes and local food items to get a feel of the location.”
Local food items? Why, that sounds an awfully lot like what agriculture provides!
And though the biggest piece of this growing culinary tourism pie is food festivals, what’s of particular interest to us is the segment that is forecasted to grow the fastest over the coming years:
The cooking classes segment, with a growth rate of 17.2%.
This is relevant to all of the farmers in our audience, as well as the tourism planners. After all, how do you have a cooking class without fresh, local ingredients?
As we’re fond of talking about here at Agritourism For All, agritourism products are structured around three elements:
Something for tourists to see
Something for tourists to do
Something for tourists to buy
By organizing a cooking class, you're giving your agritourism project a new activity for tourists to do. This could include, among other ideas, creating a local recipe or learning different ways of preparing one of your region’s ingredients.
Depending on where your project is located and what sort of establishment you’re operating out of, you may need to consider partnering with a hotel or lodge. By supplying your know-how and along with the fresh-picked produce and using their kitchen facilities, you both benefit.
From there, you’ll have developed a natural offshoot to your agritourism product, one you can list and sell on your own website, to local tourism companies, on an online travel agency, or through social media.
And that’s just the beginning.
Culinary tourism, as the article gets at, is more than just one single moment, one meal, or one ingredient.
Where leaning into culinary tourism can have even more benefits is by creating whole packages and itineraries around cooking and interacting with local food. Now, this may go beyond your level of interest or time, but it’s worth mentioning because you can play a part in the process.
This is how.
As we’ve seen, the demand for culinary tourism is increasing.
If you want to go beyond the numbers and see it in action, browse the popular tourism site Book Culinary Vacations. This is a portal dedicated to multi-day cooking courses (French cooking, organic cooking, vegan cooking, etc.) in locations as varied as France, Sri Lanka, Ethiopia, Peru, and the US.
Now, there’s quite a difference between a weeklong cooking course and a tourist visiting your farm to learn where pineapples grow. The weeklong course takes preparation, other stakeholders, and a decent marketing effort.
But it might not be as far away as you think. When you take the experience you’re already offering a bit further, when you go from picking the ingredient to actually processing it, you already have a class.
Now, what if you add a class based around another ingredient that your neighbor grows? What if you develop more dishes around both of those ingredients?
Pretty soon, an hour-long cooking course becomes two… becomes a day… becomes two. Combine that with natural attractions in your area, and there’s no telling where this will go.
It just might be the start of something delicious.
Warmly,
Alex & Joseph