Crafting food products for culturally diverse markets: a narrative synthesis

Consumer culture scholars have advanced multifaceted insights about how food products are crafted for globalizing and culturally diverse food markets; these insights have yet to be consolidated and synthesized. This paper provides a narrative synthesis of 73 consumer culture articles on food consumption and marketing from the past 30 years to advance an ordering theory that draws connections between extant insights. It introduces the concept of transcultural food marketing to denote how market actors collaboratively develop or transform a food product in culturally diverse markets aiming to facilitate market exchange. This paper conceptualizes transcultural food marketing as an intersection between two fundamental tensions: (1) territorialization and deterritorialization; and (2) familiarity and exploration—that manifest in distinct configurations. The transcultural food marketing framework advances an integrative and generative vocabulary that directs theoretical imagination toward the pluralism and plasticity in how food products are crafted for culturally diverse markets.