Perception of food and locality among Chinese tourist experiences in Finland

The study applies qualitative methods to reach a more in-depth understanding of Chinese tourists’ relations to food during their visit to Finland. The main interest is to find out how they perceive food and tourism, local food, environmentally friendly food and organic food during their trip. The preliminary results show that the Finnish food and food culture is not familiar among Chinese tourists and they have difficulties to identify the local food in holiday destinations. Concept of organic food was better understood than environmentally friendly food. Attributes like healthy, safer, natural, green, expensive and luxury were associated to the organic food. Additionally, organic food was considered to fulfill high quality standards