Cape Town’s recent peak tourism season delivered strong headline numbers, with the city welcoming 1.12 million visitors. International arrivals increased by 10% year-on-year, while domestic tourism grew by 7%.
Image by Franz Pfluegl
Yet for many small, community-based food businesses operating beyond the city’s main tourism corridors, the seasonal boom translated into limited direct benefit.
While visitor spending remains concentrated around luxury hotels, established fine-dining restaurants and curated precincts, many informal, township-based and diaspora-owned food enterprises continue to operate on the margins of the tourism economy.
This growing disconnect has prompted Unexplored Cape Town to work alongside key tourism stakeholders, including the Western Cape Department of Economic Development and Tourism (Dedat), to reflect on the outcomes of the peak season and examine how Cape Town’s tourism model can evolve to deliver broader, more inclusive economic participation.
Food as a driver of travel decisions
Food has become a decisive factor in travel planning, with research indicating that approximately 80% of travellers investigate a destination’s culinary landscape before choosing where to visit. Despite this shift, access to tourism value chains remains uneven.
Gentrification pressures, limited visibility, and structural barriers have resulted in many local food entrepreneurs being excluded from formal tourism itineraries. In some cases, this has contributed to cultural erasure and the loss of heritage-based food practices, even as the sector continues to grow.
Tourism 2.0: A shift from consumption to inclusion
Unexplored Cape Town’s response is Tourism 2.0, a framework aimed at repositioning tourism as an enabler of local economic inclusion rather than a purely extractive activity. The model prioritises fair revenue distribution, long-term community partnerships, heritage preservation, and honest storytelling across tourism experiences.
The approach challenges operators to embed these principles directly into itinerary design, procurement practices and visitor engagement, rather than treating inclusion as an add-on or corporate social responsibility initiative.
Government engagement and sector dialogue
Unexplored Cape Town recently presented the Tourism 2.0 model at the Western Cape Tourism Growth Workshop (#WCTGWorkshop2025), hosted by Dedat. The presentation reached more than 300 tourism stakeholders and focused on practical, actionable interventions to improve equity in food tourism.
“Tourism 2.0 is a framework for operators who are serious about responsible travel,” says Dennis Molewa, founder of Unexplored Cape Town. “It calls for immediate action, from inclusive hiring and fair revenue sharing to protecting heritage and building long-term relationships with local food entrepreneurs.”
Design thinking as a tool for systemic change
Recognising the need for new perspectives, Unexplored Cape Town partnered with the Hasso Plattner School of Design Thinking Afrika (d-school Afrika) at the University of Cape Town as part of its flagship Design Thinking Week programme.
Two challenge statements were presented to students:
Business-focused: How can Cape Town’s food tourism experience be redesigned to include black- and brown-owned local and diaspora businesses that are often excluded from mainstream tourism spaces?Customer-focused: How can visitors and residents more easily discover, connect with and experience diverse local food businesses that remain hidden behind commercialised offerings?More than 49 multidisciplinary students participated, conducting fieldwork across the inner city and engaging directly with Somali-owned restaurants, Senegalese dark kitchens and other diaspora-led food enterprises.
From insights to early concepts
Through immersion and research, students explored the lived realities of local food entrepreneurs and generated early-stage concepts ranging from digital onboarding tools and QR-based discovery systems to heritage food markets and collaborative food ventures.
“If design thinking taught us anything, it’s that there’s never just one problem or one solution,” says Molewa. “What matters is creating a process that allows culture, economy, identity and community to intersect meaningfully.”
Building long-term support structures
Insights from the Design Thinking Week are expected to inform the direction of the African Food Business Fund, a newly formed non-profit initiative linked to Unexplored Cape Town.
The fund aims to support marginalised, heritage-based African food enterprises through business development, digital enablement and long-term partnerships.
“The numbers show Cape Town is a global culinary destination,” Molewa notes. “But as the season ends, the real question is who benefited. Our goal is to ensure that when the next peak arrives, the tourism economy delivers shared value rather than concentrated gain.”
Find out more about the African Food Business Fund.
