《“餐饮+文旅”趋势研究报告2026》发布：餐饮与文旅深度融合 五大模式重构消费逻辑

This article compiles key takeaways from the *"Catering + Cultural Tourism" Trend Report 2026* published by the Hongcan Industry Research Institute, outlining the current state of food-tourism integration in China, and summarizing mature integration models and core success factors.

1. Core trend insight: China's domestic travel market continues to grow, reaching 6.52 billion trips in 2025, a 16.1% year-over-year increase. Food has evolved from a secondary supporting service for travel to a core driver of consumer travel decisions, giving rise to the popular trend of "traveling across the country for a signature dish"—with Zibo Barbecue and Tianshui Spicy Hot Pot being the most prominent examples.

2. Practical guidance: The report identifies five mature, market-tested food-tourism integration models: attraction-based check-in spots, regional signature food brands, cross-industry event collaborations, rural leisure dining, and immersive dining experiences. Consumers can choose experiences that fit their preferences based on this classification. The report also notes that top-tier projects all prioritize emotional and cultural value, advising travelers to prioritize dining venues rooted in local culture that carry strong social sharing appeal.

Catering-cultural tourism integration has entered a new stage, emerging as a high-growth new track for food brands. This article summarizes key trends, viable paths and success factors for brand reference.

1. Consumer trends and market landscape: China's domestic tourism has maintained double-digit growth for two consecutive years, with both national and local governments rolling out policy and activity support for food-tourism integration. Young consumers have become the core growth demographic, shifting demand from functional dining to experiences that deliver emotional and cultural value. Travel and dining decisions are now heavily driven by social media content.

2. Viable development paths: The report outlines five market-validated integration models for brands to adopt based on their positioning. Established local time-honored brands can boost interactive visitor experiences through youth-focused rebranding and tie their identity to regional cultural tourism IPs. Chain brands can integrate deeply with city characteristics to build signature regional culinary identities. Brands can also pursue growth through event collaborations or immersive dining experiences.

3. Core success factors: To gain a first-mover advantage, brands must dig deep into local culture to build uncopyable barriers, design for social shareability to drive organic word-of-mouth spread, and deliver one-of-a-kind localized experiences.

The integration of catering and cultural tourism opens new growth opportunities for food sellers. This article summarizes the policy environment, opportunity areas and key considerations for sellers.

1. Policy and market context: China's domestic tourism market continues expanding, with the Ministry of Commerce, Ministry of Culture and Tourism, and local governments actively launching supporting events including food festivals and cultural tourism carnivals, creating a favorable external environment for integrated development. The social media era has further accelerated the trend, with numerous breakout viral cases creating abundant market opportunities.

2. Opportunity avenues: Sellers can choose a model that aligns with their size and positioning. Small and medium-sized sellers can drive short-term traffic spikes by participating in local events via sponsorship, co-branding, or pop-up activations. Regional brands can tie their identity to city IP to become a regional culinary tourism signature, unlocking long-term growth. Sellers can also explore emerging tracks such as rural dining and immersive dining to meet new consumer demands.

3. Risks and considerations: To achieve sustainable growth, sellers must prioritize improving traffic conversion capabilities, avoid long-standing pitfalls of traditional scenic area dining such as inflated pricing and homogeneous products, and build social shareability to meet the sharing needs of young consumers.

The emerging trend of catering-cultural tourism integration brings new business opportunities and development directions for catering-related supply chain manufacturers.

1. Shifts in product design and production demand: Modern food-tourism projects prioritize local characteristics, cultural identity and exclusivity, creating strong demand for custom products including attraction-exclusive dishes, themed souvenirs, themed tableware for immersive dining, and processed local specialty ingredients. Manufacturers can develop tailored products to meet these needs.

2. New business opportunities: On one hand, factories can partner with various food-tourism projects to develop co-branded merchandise and custom products, expanding their B2B customer base. On the other hand, they can meet the local sourcing demand of rural food-tourism models, develop processed products based on local specialty agricultural ingredients, and open up new sales channels.

3. Key takeaways: To capture the industry dividend from food-tourism integration, manufacturers need to keep up with shifting consumer trends, align closely with new demand from the integrated sector, leverage digital capabilities to fulfill custom requests from diverse clients, and build differentiated products to unlock new growth curves.

The rapid growth of catering-cultural tourism integration has spawned strong new demand for professional services. This article summarizes industry trends and core client pain points to help service providers identify new business opportunities.

1. Industry trend: Food has shifted from a supporting service for tourism to a core driver of visitor attraction. Against the backdrop of continuous growth in China's domestic travel market, a growing number of food brands and local governments are investing in food-tourism integration projects, driving rapid growth in demand for professional services and creating large room for industry expansion.

2. Core client pain points: Most market participants lack experience in integrated development. Traditional time-honored brands lack expertise in youth-focused rebranding and social media marketing, while new brands struggle to integrate local culture to build a distinct IP. Local governments often lack systematic traffic conversion plans even after their local food goes viral. All types of projects require professional external support.

3. Business opportunities and solutions: Service providers can develop differentiated services tailored to different client needs. This includes providing strategy consulting, IP planning and social media operation services for food brands; offering scene design and content performance development for immersive dining projects; and creating systematic traffic conversion planning for local governments, to match current market demand.

The new trend of catering-cultural tourism integration brings new development opportunities and clarifies operational directions for all types of catering, tourism and social platforms.

1. Market demand: Today, a wide range of food brands and local cultural tourism projects have strong demand for integrated development, while young consumers heavily rely on platform content to make travel and dining decisions. This creates new requirements for platforms to provide traffic matching, resource integration and operational guidance, raising the bar for platform service capabilities.

2. Operational priorities: Platforms can build dedicated sections for food-tourism integration, conduct targeted recruitment for the five core integration models to attract different types of brands and projects, partner with local governments to access resources for food and tourism events, and provide traffic support and operational training for入驻 brands to help them improve traffic conversion and social sharing capabilities.

3. Risk mitigation: To achieve sustainable development, platforms must establish clear rules to supervise brand pricing and service quality, avoid the long-standing problems of overcharging and homogeneous products that plagued traditional scenic area dining, guide brands to deepen roots in local culture and deliver high-quality experiences, build a healthy platform ecosystem, and avoid reputational risks.

Based on the latest report from the Hongcan Industry Research Institute, this article outlines new industry trends in catering-cultural tourism integration and summarizes innovative business models, offering high reference value for industry research.

1. New industry dynamics: The integration of catering and cultural tourism has entered a new stage, with the role of food shifting from a secondary supporting service for scenic areas to a core driver of consumer travel decisions. Sustained growth in China's domestic tourism market has accelerated integration, while shifting demand among young consumers has driven the transformation of food consumption from functional spending to experience-focused consumption that combines emotional and cultural value, reshaping the underlying business logic of the industry.

2. Summary of innovative business models: The report outlines five mature, market-validated integration business models: attraction-based integration, regional culinary tourism IP, event-based integration, rural food-tourism, and immersive food-tourism. For each model, the report clarifies implementation paths, core success factors, and typical cases, clearly mapping out the current innovation direction of the industry.

3. Research implications: The report identifies local cultural roots as the core barrier to entry for integrated development, and IP development, social传播 and traffic conversion capabilities as the key success factors. It provides a clear analytical framework for future industry and policy research, as well as a reference for guiding the direction of industry development.