Culinary tourism helps tourists to understand a place through yet another sense — taste — and taps into the growing market of tourists who travel to experience culture, new flavors and explore culinary traditions. Through a focus on traditional foods, hospitality enterprises positively contribute to directly improving the local food economy from their purchases. At the same time, this innovative approach  utilizes tourism to create a market for traditional food products and indigenous foods that are well suited to the area as opposed to insisting that local farmers produce the ingredients of a western tourist diet that are often hard to grow.

In so doing, we see culinary tourism as a way to dynamically infuse local and indigenous cuisine into markets that otherwise are unaware of many unique, geographically identified, foods and the ancestral traditions that they provide. This new approach to tourism serves as a way to increase demand and provide innovative new revenue sources for areas of the world that are being compromised by global changes.