Taste of Place Agent

Grow your culinary and agritourism destination with on-demand expertise.

Created in partnership with the Culinary Tourism Alliance, the Taste of Place Agent assesses, measures, coaches, and refines a region's readiness and alignment with high-yield culinary and agritourism audiences.

Taste Agent assessment with a product development recommendation

The problem we are solving

Travellers increasingly choose where to go by what they can eat and drink. Building genuinely great culinary and agritourism experiences takes real expertise, and that expertise has only ever been able to reach so many destinations at a time. The Taste of Place Agent changes that. It takes the methodology the Culinary Tourism Alliance has refined over nearly two decades and makes it available to any destination, on demand.

How it works

The Alliance brought the methodology. Tourismo made it run on demand. The Taste of Place Agent:

Gathers your data. The agent reviews your public-facing experiences and signals, from reviews and menus to booking pages and social media.
Assesses your inventory. It scores each experience against the Taste of Place rubric across six dimensions of place.
Hands back a plan. You get specific, practical recommendations for your destination and your operators, plus a benchmark score to track progress over time.

What it measures

The Taste of Place Score rates whether an experience is genuinely rooted in place across six dimensions:

Taste of Place
Locality of Ingredients
Taste Reputation
Quality of Experience
Online Food Storytelling
Bookability

Who it is for

Built for destination organizations, sector associations, chambers, First Nations communities, and municipal tourism teams. It brings specialized expertise within reach of destinations of every size, including the smaller teams that have rarely had a way to access it.

In practice

Tourism Richmond, already using both Tourismo and the Culinary Tourism Alliance's expertise, sees the agent as a way to keep improving one of Canada's most successful culinary tourism programs.

"Our Dumpling Trail is one of Canada's most recognized culinary experiences, and it runs on Tourismo. We refreshed its strategy with the Culinary Tourism Alliance, and now the Taste of Place Agent brings both together, so we can keep refining and growing a world-class trail instead of guessing what to do next."
— Nancy Small, Tourism Richmond

Destination Development