Food festival experiences from visitors’ perspectives: intellectual, sensory, and social dimensions

In recent decades, food festivals have gained popularity across the world. Previous research demonstrates a great diversity in visitors’ motivation and experiences at food festivals. It includes mostly quantitative as well as a few qualitative studies, but we are still lacking in-depth knowledge about visitors’ food festival experiences. This knowledge is important for the practical organization of future food festivals, but also for food studies scholars to help them understand the exact nature and value of a food festival experience. This paper explores the diversity of food festival visitors’ experiences via semi-structured qualitative interviews with participants, supplemented by digital photos taken by them at the Danish food festival Madens Folkemøde 2019. The findings suggest a great diversity in visitors’ experiences, categorized in the article as intellectual, sensory, and social experiences and these three categories are proposed as an analytical framework for future studies.