A thriving restaurant scene alone does not make a culinary destination. What separates the places that successfully claim that positioning from those that simply have good food is the creation of a unified proposition. Aruba faced precisely this challenge. With more than 100 nationalities living on the island, its culinary offer has grown remarkably over the past decade, yet restaurants, producers and beverage companies operated independently, with no shared platform or brand behind them. 

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The Autentico Aruba Culinary Festival, winner of the Partnership Award and People's Choice Award at the 2024 X. Awards, was created to address that gap. Developed by the Aruba Tourism Authority (ATA) as part of its niche tourism strategy, the week-long event brought the island's food and beverage industry together under a single brand for the first time. A restaurant week, VIP dining experiences, workshops, live competitions and a sold-out open-air street festival combined to deliver a culinary celebration built on strategic partnership and designed for long-term growth. 

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Partnership as the Starting Point

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Many destinations approach culinary tourism development through marketing. The ATA took a different starting point. Before promoting Aruba’s food story to the world, the DMO recognised that the narrative needed to be built from within. The sector had operated without a central approach for years, and there was no collective product to present. The ATA's 2023 Niche Framework plan identified culinary tourism as a key opportunity, with a clear objective to bring the industry together, offer it a stage and build the local support needed to sustain this positioning over time.

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Over 30 restaurants participated in a dedicated restaurant week, with exclusive menus and promotional offers. Beverage vendors who had not previously collaborated agreed to work alongside one another at the Wilhelminastraat Pavilion. During the Iron Chef and Bartenders Brawl competitions, contestants earned additional points for creatively incorporating local ingredients, while producers took the stage to present their products directly to audiences. These design choices ensured that partnership was visible in every component of the event. For a sector that had previously operated in silos, this shared stage was as strategically significant as the festival's public-facing success.

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Local ownership extended to event production, brand design, music and a host of other services, all sourced from Aruba-based vendors. The approach maximised economic impact on the island whilst demonstrating the creative and operational capacity needed to sustain a multi-year programme. The "Roots of Flavor" storytelling corner, developed by an up-and-coming local curator, explored the island's pre-colonial food landscape, tracing how ingredients and recipes from its earliest settlements reflected a long history of cultural exchange through food. The installation anchored the festival in heritage, giving the Autentico brand an enhanced narrative depth. For destinations building a culinary identity, this kind of cultural grounding is what transforms an event into a story that visitors want to be part of.

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Building the Autentico Aruba Brand

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Most food festivals are planned as standalone events, with programming, partnerships and marketing built for a single edition. The ATA approached Autentico Aruba differently. The 2024 edition was explicitly conceived as a pilot year within a blueprint intended to run for five to ten years. That long-term horizon changed how decisions were made throughout the planning process. This included a local designer conducting extensive research into Aruba’s culinary identity and the wider festival landscape to carve out a distinctive position for the island. The resulting brand was built to work across digital and print formats, designed as a durable identity that could grow over successive years.

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Education was woven into the event's programme with the same long-term thinking. International chefs and mixologists led workshops for over 50 culinary students, while a preliminary competition determined which students would assist chefs on stage during the Iron Chef event. Hospitality students also gained hands-on experience through volunteering to support event operations. A sustainable culinary tourism sector requires highly trained professionals, and integrating education from the first year signals a commitment to growing the industry alongside promoting it.

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A Digital-First Strategy

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Autentico Aruba's marketing prioritised a digital-first strategy. Organic and paid social media served as the primary channels, supported by an email strategy built around audience segmentation, lead magnets, email sequencing, personalisation, interactive content, automation and measurement. Event partners also received branded social media kits to promote their participation, extending reach through each stakeholder’s own network. In a partnership-driven model, distributed marketing of this kind is more effective than relying on a single organisation’s channels.

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On the ground, the MyAruba app delivered geo-targeted push notifications to visitors before and during the festival. RFID-enabled wristbands introduced cashless payments and provided the ATA with data on attendance patterns and spending behaviour. Combined with the digital marketing channels, this created a feedback loop between promotion and performance. For a pilot year, that intelligence is valuable, providing the evidence base for informed decisions about programming, pricing and partnerships in future editions.

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Internationally, invited content creators and journalists covered the event, generating coverage in popular media outlets, including Forbes. This created powerful visibility to extend the festival’s reach across North America, Latin America and Europe. Such media coverage provides a strong foundation that the ATA could build upon for future iterations of the festival, ensuring the event develops and grows over time.

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Results and Community Response

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Autentico Aruba surpassed its performance targets. Social media goals of 1,000 followers on Facebook and Instagram were exceeded, with ticket sales also outperforming the target of 2,000 attendees per night as the event sold out completely. Beyond the immediate numbers, the pilot year validated the model. It demonstrated that a fragmented sector could come together and deliver something of genuine quality using local talent. It also enabled a set of durable assets, in brand, partnerships, digital infrastructure and education, that give each subsequent year a stronger starting position. 

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The festival’s activation in Wilhelminastraat also revealed its potential as a tool for urban renewal, drawing much-needed economic activity into the area. For DMOs exploring culinary tourism as a niche strategy, Aruba’s experience shows how partnership can turn fragmented potential into a unified proposition with real market impact. 

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Community response also carries particular weight for a strategy that depends on local participation to sustain itself over multiple years. Social media sentiment was overwhelmingly positive, with residents expressing pride in an event they felt represented the island’s identity. The festival attracted a diverse crowd of locals and visitors, strengthening community ties and helping participating vendors connect with new audiences. That kind of local buy-in has to be earned through the way an event is designed. The ATA’s decision to build the festival around local talent, local stories and local partnership is what made that response possible.