Image of Local Cuisine in Emerging Gastronomic Destinations: Scale Review, Development, and Validation

Given the increasing popularity of gastronomy tourism in emerging destinations, this study aims to develop and validate a scale that captures the image of local cuisine from domestic and international tourists’ perspectives. The present study follows three sequential phases of the scale development procedure: qualitative inquiry, scale refinement, and validation. The image dimensions i.e., physical well-being, culinary heritage, sensory appeal, gastronomic offerings, and affective image were tested using independent samples. In the calibration and validation sample, the five underlying dimensions showed support for a higher-order structure of scale related to image of local cuisine. The measurement invariance analysis confirmed the generalizability of cuisine image scale across the domestic and foreign tourists.