The Safeguarding of Italian Eno-Gastronomic Tradition and Culture around the World: A Strategic Tool to Enhance the Restaurant Services

The eno-gastronomic heritage can be considered an essential resource to create a national appeal and increase the phenomenon of tourism that is strongly tied to food. Indeed, the Italian food products are an important promotion element for Italian territories and a useful tool to increase the tourist offer not only at the national level. Unfortunately, the success of Italian food has created a parallel economy of counterfeit goods that recall an Italian origin and has generated an economic loss for the real Italian food industry. Therefore, in an effort to win the consumers’ trust again, the European Union has implemented a complex system of rules/regulations on food safety and food quality issues. Indeed, the EU guarantees high safety standards on foodstuff sold on the European markets through strict production requirements and, at the same time, provides some voluntary quality systems i.e. PDO, PGI etc. There are also various private certification schemes dedicated to the valorization of food products and food service. The “Italian Hospitality– Italian Restaurants around the World” project is inserted in this perspective. It is a certification scheme related to restaurant services abroad and it aims at promoting the traditional Italian food and gastronomy the world over and defending the Italian culture and the consumers from food fraud. This study reports an analysis of this quality system and evaluation during its implementation phase.