Culinary Heritage Mapping for Sustainable Gastronomic Tourism: A Spatial Planning Framework for Thanh Hoa Province, Vietnam

Gastronomy has been recognized as a source of place-based advantage for destination differentiation and territorial development. Culinary inventories are commonly used tools for documentation and planning purposes but often remain descriptive in nature and do not readily support spatial tourism analysis. This research created a Food Heritage Spatial Framework for Thanh Hoa Province, Vietnam, by converting a previously compiled inventory of 122 recorded culinary specialties into an analytically usable spatial database. Culinary specialties were coded based on seven traits, including ingredient base, cultural derivation, processing style, food type, cultural significance, peak season, and ecological region, then mapped using Geographic Information System (GIS) technology and clustered using mixed-attribute cluster analysis. Cluster analysis was performed using Gower dissimilarity to accommodate mixed data types, followed by Partitioning Around Medoids (PAM) and hierarchical clustering. Validity of clusters was determined using silhouette analysis. Spatial differentiation of cuisine revealed three ecological-zone patterns distributed across mountainous–midland (56 specialties; 45.9%), river delta–lowland (40; 32.8%), and coastal–estuarine (26; 21.3%) ecological regions. Cluster analysis revealed four key culinary strategy groups: Royal Heritage, Ethno-Ecological, Urban Gastronomy, and Marine Gastronomy, with an overall average silhouette width of 0.48. Findings illustrated how Thanh Hoa’s existing culinary geography represents differences in ecology as well as historical associations, local knowledge systems, processing styles and urban functions. These spatial patterns and identified culinary groups were mapped as potential gastronomic tourism itineraries and described within an integrated value-chain framework. This spatially derived gastronomy framework provides a planning basis that may support spatially informed gastronomic tourism development by linking culinary heritage with local communities, producers, destination characteristics, and regional development priorities. The study demonstrates how a descriptive culinary inventory can be transformed into a spatially organized and analytically usable planning framework that may support future sustainable gastronomic tourism planning.