ABOUT US

We help destinations develop, protect, and showcase the culinary cultures that make them unique.

Since 2003, the World Food Travel Association has worked with destinations, governments, tourism organizations, and industry professionals to strengthen gastronomy tourism through strategy, education, research, and global collaboration.


We believe every destination has a unique Taste of Place shaped by its culinary traditions, local producers, and food culture. Our role is to help destinations protect, develop, and showcase those assets in ways that benefit both residents and visitors.


Through consulting, professional education, research, recognition programs, and international events, we help build stronger destinations and a more sustainable global tourism industry.

OUR MISSION

Our mission is to help destinations recognize, protect, develop, and showcase the unique culinary cultures that define their Taste of Place. We work alongside destination leaders, governments, tourism organizations, businesses, and communities to strengthen gastronomy tourism as a driver of sustainable economic development, cultural preservation, and memorable visitor experiences.


Through research, education, strategic consulting, and global collaboration, we empower destinations to celebrate their culinary heritage while creating lasting benefits for residents, businesses, and travelers alike.

WHAT WE DO

The WFTA works with destinations, governments, tourism organizations, educational institutions, and industry professionals to strengthen gastronomy tourism through:


OUR IMPACT

For more than two decades, we've helped shape the global gastronomy tourism industry through pioneering research, professional education, destination consulting, international events, and global collaboration.


  • We represent 150 countries
  • We've reached tens of thousands of professionals
  • We've supported dozens of destinations
  • We've published over 100 studies
  • We have more 25 years of experience leading our industry

OUR TEAM

Meet our current staff, board members, ambassadors, and interns.

Meet Our Team

25 Years of Industry Leadership

A quarter century of pioneering ideas, landmark publications, original research and initiatives that helped shape the global gastronomy tourism industry. Filter by the kind of work, or show only the industry firsts.

14 milestones, 9 of them industry firsts

  1. The Founding Years 2001 to 2006

  2. 2001
    Published The first culinary tourism white paper Research Innovation Industry First

    The Paper That Named A Field

    Before 2001 there was no such thing as culinary tourism as a named field of practice. Our first white paper argued that food and drink were not an amenity attached to a trip but a reason to take one. It gave destinations language for something many of them had been doing accidentally for decades. That paper is the reason this organization exists, and much of the vocabulary the sector now uses without thinking traces back to it.

  3. 2003
    Founded The International Culinary Tourism Association Leadership Industry First

    An Institutional Home For The Idea

    A white paper on its own changes nothing. The International Culinary Tourism Association was founded to give the idea a home, a membership, and somewhere for practitioners to find each other. At the time the entire audience would have fit in a single room. It became the first professional body anywhere dedicated to food and drink tourism, and it remains the legal foundation of the organization today under the name International Culinary Tourism Institute.

  4. 2004
    Hosted The first international culinary tourism conference Leadership Education Industry First

    The Room Where The Sector Met Itself

    The first international culinary tourism conference brought together operators, destination marketers, chefs, and researchers who had never been in the same room. Conferences are where a discipline discovers that it exists. People arrived believing they were doing something local and idiosyncratic, and left understanding they were part of something global. The format we tested that year is the direct ancestor of the FoodTreX conference series that now runs across several continents.

  5. 2006
    Conducted The first global consumer food travel research Research Industry First

    Evidence Instead Of Assumption

    Everyone in the sector had opinions about who food travelers were. Nobody had data. Our first global consumer study replaced anecdote with evidence, and the findings surprised the industry. The most important of them was that food travelers are not a narrow band of wealthy gourmets but a broad and varied population with very different motivations. That study set the pattern for every piece of primary research we have published since.

  6. Building The Discipline 2010 to 2018

  7. 2010
    Introduced PsychoCulinary Profiling® Innovation Research Industry First

    Segmenting By Appetite, Not Demographics

    PsychoCulinary Profiling answered a question our 2006 research raised but could not solve. If food travelers are not one audience, then what are they? The framework segments travelers by culinary motivation rather than by age or income, because motivation is what actually predicts behavior. It gave destinations a way to stop marketing to everybody and start marketing to the visitors they can genuinely satisfy. It remains one of our most widely applied tools.

  8. 2012
    Rebranded As the World Food Travel Association Leadership

    Widening The Door

    The word culinary had become a barrier. It suggested white tablecloths and fine dining to audiences whose food culture actually lives in markets, street carts, home kitchens, and farms. Renaming the organization the World Food Travel Association was a deliberate widening of the door, because food travel is what most of the world does. The change cost us some brand recognition in the short term and it bought us the whole world in the long term.

  9. 2014
    Published Have Fork, Will Travel Education

    Have Fork, Will Travel

    This was written as the practical handbook the field had never had. Not theory, but how to design an experience, price it, market it, and keep it honest to the place it comes from. It has been used as a course text and as a desk reference by operators in dozens of countries. Publishing it was a deliberate decision to put the method into everybody's hands rather than keep it locked inside a consultancy.

  10. 2015
    Hosted The first Online Food Travel Summit Leadership Education Industry First

    Virtual Five Years Early

    Conferences favor the people who can afford to fly. Taking the summit online was about reaching the practitioners who could not, particularly in emerging destinations where the need was greatest and the travel budgets smallest. It was the first fully virtual event in the sector, five years before the rest of the world discovered virtual events out of necessity. Attendance came from places that had never once been represented at an industry gathering.

  11. 2016
    Launched The Food Travel Monitor Research Industry First

    From Studies To Trend Lines

    The Food Travel Monitor turned our research from occasional studies into a continuing series, which is what makes trend lines possible. One survey tells you where an industry stands. A repeated survey tells you where it is going. The Monitor has become a reference dataset for the sector, and it is cited by destination organizations, academics, and national tourism bodies building the case for investment in food tourism.

  12. 2018
    Expanded FoodTreX into a global conference series Leadership Education

    Decentralizing The Conversation

    FoodTreX grew from a single annual event into a series held across regions, with each edition shaped by the food culture hosting it rather than by a template flown in from somewhere else. The point was decentralization. A conference in Africa should not look like a conference in Scandinavia. The series is now the main place where this professional community meets, argues, and recruits the next generation of practitioners.

  13. The Stewardship Era 2021 to today

  14. 2021
    Introduced Capitals of Culinary Culture certification Innovation Leadership Industry First

    Recognition Earned, Not Bid For

    Capitals of Culinary Culture was created because the recognition then available to destinations rewarded ambition and marketing spend more than it rewarded actual food culture. Our certification assesses what a place genuinely has and genuinely protects, and it is open to regions and small destinations rather than to capital cities alone. It is a certification rather than a competition, which means a destination is measured against a published standard instead of against its neighbors.

  15. 2025
    Launched The Taste of Place movement Innovation Leadership

    A Framework That Became A Movement

    Taste of Place began as a framework and grew into something larger. The argument is simple and not entirely comfortable. Food tourism can either strengthen a local food culture or hollow it out, and which of the two happens comes down to choices made by people who often do not realize they are making them. The movement exists to put those choices in front of destinations, producers, and travelers before the damage is done rather than afterwards.

  16. 2025
    Published Crafting Your Taste of Place Education

    Crafting Your Taste of Place

    This is the working manual for the movement. It takes the argument out of the realm of principle and into the realm of decisions, setting out the questions a destination needs to answer about its own food culture and the order in which to answer them. It is written for the person who has to make something happen on a limited budget with imperfect support, because that describes most of the people doing this work.

  17. 2026
    Introduced The Gastronomy Tourism Maturity Index Innovation Research Industry First

    Eighty-Four Countries, Six Pillars

    The Gastronomy Tourism Maturity Index scores 84 countries across six pillars covering heritage, land, experience, leadership, stewardship, and access. It exists because destinations kept asking a fair question that nobody could answer with rigor, which is how do we compare. The Index gives a country an honest picture of where it is strong, where it is exposed, and what the credible next move looks like. It is the most demanding research we have ever undertaken.

Research

Advancing knowledge through original primary research and published insight.

Leadership

Building and leading the global gastronomy tourism community.

Education

Sharing knowledge and inspiring growth through events and publications.

Innovation

Creating the frameworks, methodologies, and standards the sector now uses.