The effect of gastronomic familiarity of appetizers on consumer attitudes and behavioral intentions: The case of Edremit Bay

The impact of gastronomy on tourism is increasing day by day. With this positive effect, destinations benefit from various methods to promote, market and protect their local flavors. The main problem of the study is that although the "meze" product, which is one of the local flavors, is found in most cuisines around the world, these gastronomic products are not adequately promoted and there are not enough studies in the literature. As a result, a conceptual framework was created based on "meze" by scanning the concepts such as meze culture, local flavor, authentic flavor, etc. in the literature. In addition, the dog tags of the appetizers in Edremit Bay were created by the researcher after reviewing the books on Edremit Bay food. In the tags created, the ingredients, service time, consumption season, recipe and photographs of the appetizers were included. The photographs were taken by the researcher after the appetizers were prepared according to the recipe. Two theses and three articles were reached by analyzing the studies on the concept of appetizers. As a result of the scans, the gastronomic familiarity, attitudes and behavioral intentions of appetizer consumers were determined by determining the central points on the coasts of Edremit, Burhaniye and Ayvalık, and 400 voluntary participants were reached between January and May 2023, and the questionnaires were applied through face-to-face interviews. The collected data were subjected to reliability, validity, correlation and regression analysis in SPSS program.