Determining the gastronomy routes by creating Afyonkarahisar gastronomy inventory

Gastronomy has become an important tool for destination marketing. According to the World Tourism Organization 80% of tourists prioritize gastronomic offerings in their holiday decision makings. The starting point to exploration of gastronomic offereings of a destination is to determine the gastronomic inventory and routes of the region. Hence, the aim of this research is to create the gastronomy inventory of Afyonkarahisar and to determine the gastronomy routes. In order to create gastronomy inventory and routes; all districts, towns and villages in Afyonkarahisar province were considered as the universe in this research. Due to the time and financial constraints, rather than conducting research in all places, 9 towns and 40 villages,which offers different local tastes and are highly important for gastronomy were chosen according to critarian technic from purposeful sampling. Between the 10 July 2021 and 5 September 2021, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 51 participants. Interview data were transciribed and anayzed through MAXQDA 2020 software program. While gastronomy inventory were explored through descriptive anlaysis. gastronomy routes were created by drawing maps on ArcGIS program that has been in use in gesographic information systems. According to the results 87 new gastronomic product were explored in Afyonkarahisar cousine. It is noted that Afyonkarahisar's cuisine varies and is affected by ethnicity, residential area, agricultural production, and livestock activities. It has been determined that traditional dishes, food storage methods, ceremonial dishes, cooking tools, bread baking methods, winter preparations and traditional dishes differ according to the regions In the light of the data obtained, the routes of production facilities including Turkish delight, poppy, meat and meat products, cream and vegetable/fruit production facilities, sheep yogurt, sheep cheese, goat cheese, poppy, cherry and agricultural production routes were determined.