MED Culinary heritage experiences: how to create sustainable tourist destinations
MEDFEST is tackling the challenge of diversifying traditional ‘sun & sea’ tourist destinations, with new and sustainable products based on rich and renowned culinary heritage of the Mediterranean. In so doing, we will increase the sustainability and quality of life in MED space. Our objective is to create tools and instruments for designing new sustainable culinary experiences, which will be offered to visitors to: 1) diversify the tourism sector in terms of products and its seasonality; 2) bring tourism development to the coastal hinterland; 3) safeguard culinary heritage for future generations.

To achieve the stated objectives we will produce the following outputs:
- Tools for enhancing sustainable tourist destinations by using culinary heritage as a resource.
- Creation of eight new sustainable tourist destinations in MED space based on the culinary heritage.
- Common transnational strategy on managing and planning culinary tourism in MED space.

This approach is unique because MED culinary heritage initiatives are generally unconnected and to this day there have been only few common approaches developed to integrate the MED culinary heritage into a sustainable tourist offer. The methodology in MEDFEST is based on participatory action planning, where three main types of stakeholders (producers, tourism organisations, policy makers) are involved and take responsibility for project’s actions from the beginning till the end to ensure the durability of the results.