Each month the Scattered Clouds blog takes a look at the wonderful world of tourism through a data and evidence-led lens, all in pursuit of transforming tourism sector data into insight of course!
Provenance of food and drink - May 2025
You may know that this is the 50th anniversary of the first airing of The Good Life by the BBC. What you’re highly unlikely to know though is that back in the late 1970s Felecity Kendal was my first crush, but don’t panic, that’s not the topic of this month’s blog, rather it got me thinking about how important the provenance of food and drink can be, not just to individuals hellbent on self-sufficiency, but to the wider tourism offer of a destination.
Plenty of places around the world have a strong association with a particular cuisine or beverage, be it pasta, Wiener schnitzel, goulash, paella or Guinness. There are lots of items that have protected geographical status, with UK examples including Melton Mowbray pork pies, West Country farmhouse Cheddar, Jersey royal potatoes, Arbroath smokies or the Cornish pasty.
If we are taking a short-break or holiday away from home there are a couple of things we will definitely do, one is sleep, the other is eat and drink, so dining plays an integral role in our tourism ecosystem.
It is true that we need to eat and drink to give us energy, but when away from home this takes on an extra dimension as we’ll often be sitting down for a meal in a place that we’re unfamiliar with, and there’s a reasonable chance that people we’ve never before met will have prepared and served our food.
Food and drink can be multi-sensory in a way few other things are, there’s the taste obviously but so too the smells, visual appearance, texture and so on. As such it can help create a lasting memory of the place we are visiting and give us the appetite (sorry!) to return in the future.
Back in 2022 VisitBritain undertook a major piece of research across all of our key inbound source markets, with one strand of the study focussing on the various drivers of destination choice. Respondents were invited to state how important each of twenty-five statements was in terms of influencing their choice of destination and ‘There is a good variety of food and drink to try’ emerged as the seventh most important, ahead of statements such as ‘It is easy to get to’ and ‘Is a place where I can explore history and heritage’.
When asked which of the 25 statements they associated with different countries, one of which was of course Great Britain, ‘There is a good variety of food and drink to try’ was very much in the bottom half of the table, in 17th spot, with only 43% saying they associated this statement with Britain.
That’s not to say international visitors don’t eat and drink while here, according to estimates from the International Passenger Survey ‘Dining in restaurants’ is the most commonly undertaken activity among inbound holiday visitors, with 71% doing so, but of equal note is that 46% said ‘Going to the pub’ was an activity they indulged in while here, demonstrating that the worrying trend of pub closures due to spiralling costs is not just a loss to local communities but to our appeal as an international visitor destination.
Food and drink matter just as much to our domestic visitors as those from overseas. Research undertaken last autumn by VisitAberdeenshire explored the extent to which 1,600 GB residents who were open to the idea of holidaying domestically agreed with various statements regarding their holiday attitudes.
The statement eliciting the strongest levels of agreement was ‘I love to taste and experience local food and drink’, reminding us just how important it is for the hospitality industry to convey the provenance of the items on a menu, highlighting those that are sourced locally.
A study by Accor undertaken towards the end of last year quizzed almost 8,000 Europeans who were intending to travel in 2025 about their attitudes towards sustainability issues, finding that 32% of respondents said that ‘Choose locally sourced and/or seasonal produce’ was a step they would consciously take on holiday in 2025.
This confirms that not only does advertising that produce is local helps to create a sense of place, it will make visitors feel they are bolstering their green credentials, all while doing something (eating) that they would have to do anyway.
The latest wave of a long-running European Travel Commission study polled six thousand Europeans spread across ten nations during March 2025, with one question being “What type of leisure trip within Europe are you most likely to undertake next”. Not surprisingly ‘Sun and Beach’ and ‘Culture and Heritage’ were cited most often, but 5% of respondents said their next trip would be ‘Culinary – Food & Wine’.
There is sometimes a tendency for destinations to want to brag about the number of fine-dining restaurants that visitors could frequent were they to visit, but an alternative, perhaps better, strategy would be to brag about the effort local restaurants, cafes and pubs are making to serve regional cuisine based on locally sourced produce that hasn’t accumulated airmiles between its harvest and appearance on a plate.
For those of you who may have recently migrated away from what was once Twitter, or are considering so doing, please note that I will be ceasing my regular content sharing on that platform at the end of the year as a stiff breeze has pushed Scattered Clouds towards a patch of blue sky… @tourismstats.bsky.social.