Food as a Tourism Attraction:

Food Tourism policy analyzing in Iran

Abstract

Food tourism is one of the creative branches of tourism which plays a substantial role in sustainable development. Iran’s capacities for developing food tourism have attracted the attention of tourism stakeholders towards this field. Policies were formed in line with its improvement. This paper aims to analyze the food tourism policy in Iran. The policy triangle was used to conduct a qualitative analysis on policy. The total population under the study included various stakeholders of food tourism policy as well as the policy documents. The entire credible documents were analyzed at the first stage rather than carrying out sampling. In the second stage, semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted with food tourism stakeholders. Results show that factors such as food culture and decreased national income have paved the way for focusing on food tourism. Policies such as global registration of Iranian foods and branding certain cities as creative food cities were implemented to develop food tourism in Iran. Despite preparing a set of strategies to develop food tourism, a unified approach to involve this branch of tourism in the agenda there has never been tried. Given the rich culture of Iranian foods' great ability, it is proposed that associated officials carry out coordinated and comprehensive planning to develop food tourism in Iran.