Abstract

Food festivals have become important instruments of regional tourism development, destination branding, agricultural promotion, and cultural policy. Yet the authenticity of food festivals is often evaluated through visitor perception or promotional discourse, leaving limited room for scalable assessment across large festival systems. This study develops a Location Quotient (LQ)-based framework for measuring agricultural embeddedness as a supply-side structural condition that can support objective material authenticity claims. Using a dataset of 277 South Korean regional food festivals, the study examines how featured food materials are connected to regional agricultural specialization and how this structural connection compares with budget scale, infrastructure, and material-duplication factors in explaining administrative visitor attendance and portfolio-level governance patterns. The results show that agricultural embeddedness is unevenly distributed across the national festival portfolio. Festival budget is the strongest predictor of log-transformed visitor attendance, whereas agricultural embeddedness is not significantly associated with visitor attendance after budget and infrastructure controls are included. Material-level duplication is useful as a portfolio diagnostic for identifying crowded food categories where place-product credibility may become strategically important. Scenario-based portfolio comparisons provide planning benchmarks suggesting that targeted restructuring and reallocation would be associated with higher average agricultural embeddedness under specified portfolio assumptions, although these scenarios should not be interpreted as causal forecasts. The study contributes to food tourism, event governance, and destination branding research by offering a reproducible way to assess the material grounding of food festival authenticity claims and by shifting policy discussion from festival proliferation toward portfolio quality.

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