Ten Countries Building National Gastronomy Identities for International Markets

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Lima hosted The World’s 50 Best Restaurants ceremony on 4 November 2026, the first held in South America, and a Basque grill took the top prize. Spain’s Asador Etxebarri ranked first, and Thailand’s Gaggan came second. Peru has spent nearly two decades turning its kitchens into a national brand, and it still did not win. The result shows where the contest now sits. National gastronomy identities earn tourists through state policy, funding and festivals, not through one chef’s ranking.

Ten countries run the most deliberate versions of that strategy: Peru, Mexico, Thailand, Vietnam, South Korea, Japan, Türkiye, Georgia, Saudi Arabia and Senegal. They differ in method but share a habit. They pay for foreign validation, then measure success in arrivals and spend. 

This feature lists the ten, tests the tourism model behind them, and sets out what Africa and Nigeria should copy and avoid.

Which Countries Are Building National Gastronomy Identities?

1. Peru runs food as a state export. PROMPERÚ, its export and tourism agency, launched the Perú Mucho Gusto fair in 2008 and took it abroad for the first time in Madrid in April 2025, then to Brooklyn that September. The World Travel Awards have named Peru the world’s best culinary destination 12 times. PROMPERÚ also reports that more than 175,000 foreign visitors came for food, and 54% of them were millennials.

2. Mexico wrote the Michelin Guide into official policy. The tourism ministry, SECTUR, and the restaurant chamber CANIRAC presented a joint gastronomy agenda in December 2025, and officials say about 30% of traveller spending goes on food. The 2025 Michelin selection recognised 181 restaurants across six regions, and the 2026 edition adds Jalisco, Puebla and Yucatán. Officials also plan an International Taco Competition and a gastronomy zone at the 2026 Tianguis Turístico.

3. Thailand pays Michelin to map its food. The Tourism Authority of Thailand (TAT) has funded the guide since 2017 and renewed the deal for 2022–26 at US$4.1 million. TAT says the guide generated more than 842 million baht for the tourism economy in its first five years, and that food and drink accounted for 25% of tourist spending per trip in 2019. A TAT survey found that more than 94% of foreigners who visited Michelin-listed restaurants said they would likely seek other places in Thailand to eat, and most listed restaurants reported income rises of 30–40%.

4. Vietnam moved from street-food fame to formal strategy in three years. Michelin arrived in 2023, and the 2025 selection lists 181 establishments across Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City and Da Nang, according to The Hanoi Times. The tourism ministry now finalises a 2026–35 culinary tourism plan that targets a place among Asia’s five most attractive culinary destinations by 2035.

5. South Korea sells its identity as a supply chain. Exports of food and agriculture-related products, branded K-Food+, reached a record $13.62 billion in 2025, up 5.1%. The agriculture ministry then set a $21 billion export target for 2030 and promised food-focused tourism programmes to turn visitors into advocates.

From Heritage Listings to Fine-Dining Guides

6. Japan converted a heritage listing into spending power. UNESCO recognised washoku in the same 2010–13 window as French and Mexican cuisine. International visitors then spent a record ¥9.5 trillion in 2025, and eating and drinking took ¥2 trillion of it, a 21.9% share, according to the Japan Tourism Agency. The government wants annual inbound spending to reach ¥15 trillion by 2030.

7. Türkiye uses food to move visitors beyond the beach. Gastronomy supplies nearly 20% of tourism income, and more than 900,000 people worked in food and beverage services by mid-2025. Culture and Tourism Minister Mehmet Nuri Ersoy called gastronomy his ministry’s most effective weapon when Michelin unveiled its 2025 Türkiye selection. Tourism revenue reached $65.2 billion in 2025, and the ministry has set a $68 billion target for 2026.

8. Georgia sells the table and the wine cellar as one product. Food and beverages took 23% of international tourist spending in 2025, or GEL 3.5 billion of GEL 15 billion. The national tourism administration now runs Gemo Fest, a series of regional food events in Imereti, Guria, Samtskhe-Javakheti, Racha and Svaneti. The state also backs the wine side of the brand: wine and alcoholic beverage exports earned a record $565 million in 2024, and the 2025 promotion budget rose to GEL 17.4 million.

9. Saudi Arabia builds a food identity from a standing start. The state created the Culinary Arts Commission in 2020, and on 24 June 2025 Michelin announced a partnership with it for a first national guide in 2026, covering Riyadh and Jeddah.

10. Senegal holds the oldest claim and the thinnest machinery. Women in the fishing communities of Saint-Louis carried ceebu jën, the rice-and-fish dish, from mother to daughter, and local lore credits a 19th-century cook, Penda Mbaye, with its invention. The dish mattered because Senegalese people read it as an affirmation of national identity, and UNESCO inscribed it in December 2021. Today it sits beside Italian cuisine, which on 10 December 2025 became the first national cuisine listed in its entirety. Yet, we found no Senegalese Michelin partnership or national food-tourism target in public sources.

Where the Tourism Model Breaks Down

The first flaw is purchased validation. Thailand pays Michelin Travel Partner France US$820,000 a year under the 2022–26 contract, according to the Thai cabinet’s approval in October 2021. TAT reports strong returns, claiming 842 million baht against a first contract it pledged at 144 million baht. Critics question the logic. The South China Morning Post reported in 2018 that the Korea Tourism Organisation had faced criticism for handing over 2 billion won to support a Seoul guide. Erik Wolf, executive director of the US-based World Food Travel Association, told the paper he would not choose a destination from a top-50 list. In contrast, Michelin’s international director, Gwendal Poullennec, insisted the selection stays independent. The model buys visibility, and the evidence that visibility moves travellers comes largely from the governments that pay for it.

The second flaw is incumbent capture. Mexican officials said the Michelin Guide arrived through negotiations with CANIRAC, the national restaurant chamber, and the 2025 edition covered six regions while Jalisco, Puebla and Yucatán waited until 2026. Industry bodies sit at the table when these deals close. The sources we reviewed do not show producers’ groups there.

The third flaw is concentration. Japan Tourism Agency data show Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto, Hokkaido and Okinawa took 69.7% of foreign guest stays in 2025, while 31 prefectures took less than 1%. Peru shows the human version. Belinda Zakrzewska, an assistant professor of marketing at the University of Birmingham in the UK, argued in The Conversation in 2025 that celebrity chefs from Lima profit from Indigenous ingredients and techniques without fair compensation to the communities that safeguarded them for centuries.

The fourth flaw is fragmentation. At a Hanoi seminar on 13 July 2026, experts agreed that Vietnam’s culinary tourism products remain fragmented and that the culture, tourism, agriculture and creative sectors coordinate poorly. Vietnam has the strategy on paper and lacks the system beneath it.

All ten models share a fifth, quieter flaw. Every figure above counts arrivals, spend or restaurant listings. None of the official figures we reviewed shows how much of that spend reaches farmers, fishers or street vendors. Without that data, a government cannot tell a food economy from a marketing campaign.

The RCA Position

How to Build National Gastronomy Identities That Pay Producers

Africa can still choose a better model. We recommend six moves.

1. Write producer metrics into every promotion contract. Governments that fund a guide or festival should require reports on the share of spend that reaches local suppliers, not only total tourist outlay. Thailand’s tourism authority already surveys visitors and restaurants, so adding a supplier-income line would cost little.

2. Take the money outside the capital. Georgia’s Gemo Fest shows the method, and Japan’s concentration shows the cost of skipping it. Mexico’s wider Michelin coverage in 2026 follows the same logic.

3. Build the database before buying the badge. Vietnamese experts proposed a national culinary database and food map in July 2026. African states should document dishes, producers and seasons first, then approach any foreign guide from a position of data.

4. Run heritage listing as a domestic project. Senegal’s culture ministry submitted its ceebu jën file in October 2020 and won inscription in December 2021, and Italy’s 2025 listing proves the route now covers whole national cuisines. Nigeria has no culinary listing yet, which makes the route urgent.

5. Credit and pay producers by name. Contracts with chefs and hotels should name suppliers, and festivals should reserve stalls for cooks and farmers from the cuisine’s home communities. A dish with a named community of origin is also harder for a rival to claim.

6. Audit the results independently. Governments should ask universities, not the agency that signed the contract, to test whether promotion spend raised producer incomes.

We argue that these governments have built promotion machines rather than food economies, because they invest heavily in guides, awards and festivals while the cooks, farmers and fishers who carry the cuisine capture the smallest share of the money.

The question for every government on this list is the one Africa now faces: will food policy pay the people who cook, or only the people who rank them? Nigeria has the dishes, the diaspora and a Guinness record, but it still lacks the national strategy this list proves necessary. Africa’s kitchens deserve a strategy that pays them first. RCA has already set out that case in Nigeria’s Food Tourism Boom: Hilda Baci’s Jollof Record and Investments for Global Appeal. Read it here: https://rexclarkeadventures.com/nigeria-food-tourism-hilda-baci/

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What This Means for Africa’s and Nigeria’s Tourism Sector

Africa already owns the audience this model needs. UN Tourism counted 81 million international arrivals in Africa in 2025, up 8%, the fastest regional growth in the world. Every country on the list shows that food claims a large share of each visitor’s budget, so a food strategy raises revenue per traveller without waiting for more travellers.

Nigeria holds the strongest hand and plays it loosely. RCA reported in September 2025 that Nigeria lacks a cohesive national food-tourism strategy, and BusinessDay commentary for World Food Day 2025 noted that no Nigerian dish appears on UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage list. The federal tourism ministry leans on spectacle instead: Hilda Baci’s 8,780 kg jollof record in September 2025, and a planned Guinness attempt at a 3.6 km dining table in Abuja announced in November 2025. Spectacle draws cameras. It does not build a supply chain, a heritage dossier or a trail map.

Ghana and Senegal each lead on one front. Ghana’s tourism ministry staged AfroGastro, its first government-backed pan-African food festival, in Accra on 17–18 October 2025, and Senegal holds the UNESCO listing for ceebu jën, the dish whose folk-history lineage ties to jollof rice. UN Tourism and the Basque Culinary Centre also co-organised the Second UN Regional Forum on Gastronomy Tourism for Africa in Arusha in March 2025. Nigeria must answer with documentation, not volume.

Three consequences follow for the continent. First, Nigeria should map the cuisines of its 250-plus ethnic groups as national assets, not state-by-state lifestyle content. Second, West African states should consider a joint heritage file, as Mauritania, Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia achieved for couscous, rather than fight a jollof war that spends attention and builds no shared asset. Third, no African government should buy a foreign guide before it fixes the hygiene, transport and security gaps that RCA flagged in 2025. A badge on a restaurant door does not move a visitor through an unreliable airport.

Do not stop at the plate. Read RCA’s case for a Nigerian food-tourism strategy, then follow our coverage of the air links and policies that decide where Africa’s visitors eat next.

FAQs

1. Which countries are building national gastronomy identities for international markets?

Ten stand out for deliberate, state-backed programmes: Peru, Mexico, Thailand, Vietnam, South Korea, Japan, Türkiye, Georgia, Saudi Arabia and Senegal. They use different tools, from Michelin partnerships in Thailand and Mexico to UNESCO listing in Senegal and export targets in South Korea.

2. How much of a tourist’s budget goes on food?

It varies but runs large. Mexican officials put it at about 30% of traveller spending; Vietnam’s tourism authority at 25–35%; Thailand at 25% per trip in 2019; Georgia at 23% in 2025; and Japan at 21.9% in 2025.

3. Does the Michelin Guide actually boost tourism?

The Tourism Authority of Thailand says the guide generated more than 842 million baht in its first five years. Sceptics point out that governments fund the guide and supply much of the evidence of its impact, and a food-travel industry leader said in 2018 that top-50 lists do not decide his destinations.

4. What is the biggest weakness of the gastronomy tourism model?

Benefits concentrate in capitals and elite dining rooms. Japan’s five busiest prefectures took 69.7% of foreign guest stays in 2025, and Peruvian scholars argue that Indigenous producers see little of the money their ingredients generate.

5. What should Nigeria do to build a national food identity?

Nigeria should publish a national food-tourism strategy, document its regional cuisines and producers, prepare a UNESCO heritage dossier, and fix hygiene and transport gaps before it buys any foreign guide. Diaspora restaurants and festivals can then carry a story the country has already defined.