Tourism boards are increasingly weaponizing food and beverage culture as the primary hook for destination marketing — and Visit Tacoma-Pierce County is the latest to make that bet explicit. The DMO's newly published "PNW Starter Pack" is a structured three-day itinerary that routes visitors through Tacoma, Lakewood, Steilacoom, Puyallup, and Sumner with coffee roasteries, waterfront seafood, teriyaki spots, and farm-sourced meals as the connective tissue.
For food and beverage operators in the region, the play is straightforward: destination marketing organizations are now functioning as de facto discovery engines for independent restaurants and specialty producers. When a DMO routes overnight visitors to a specific coffee roastery or farm dining experience, it functions like a curated editorial placement — without the ad spend.
What Operators Should Note
The itinerary is built around the kind of operators that rarely have marketing budgets to match their quality: independent roasters, waterfront lunch spots, seasonal farm stands, and neighborhood restaurants. Matt Wakefield, Chief Marketing and Data Officer for Visit Tacoma-Pierce County, framed the strategy plainly: "You can learn a lot about a place by seeing what people make time for. Here, that might be a conversation with a coffee roaster, lunch on the waterfront or an afternoon spent picking out a pumpkin."
That framing — ordinary pleasures as destination-worthy — is a positioning shift worth tracking. DMOs are moving away from landmark-and-attraction itineraries toward experience-led routes anchored in local food culture. Autumn pumpkin patches, corn mazes, and kayak rentals in Steilacoom fill the experiential gaps between meals, but food remains the throughline. Lodging options listed include a farm tiny home where, per the release, alpacas compete with the television for attention — a signal that agritourism accommodation is being bundled into F&B-led travel packages at the regional level.
The Broader Signal for F&B Brands
For operators and food brands thinking about brand visibility and placement strategy, DMO itinerary inclusion is an underutilized channel. A coffee roaster featured in a published, SEO-indexed itinerary captures search traffic from trip-planners months before a visit. The same logic applies to farm operations, seafood purveyors, and specialty food retailers that anchor the "authentic local" narrative tourists are actively seeking.
This also connects to a wider operator intelligence trend: food and beverage experiences now account for a growing share of leisure travel decision-making. Destination marketing is no longer a side channel for F&B brands — it is an acquisition channel. Regional producers and independent restaurant operators who have not yet engaged their local DMO for itinerary consideration are leaving a low-cost visibility opportunity on the table. Pierce County's Starter Pack is a template worth studying for operators in any market with an active tourism board.
Written by Michael Politz, Author of Guide to Restaurant Success: The Proven Process for Starting Any Restaurant Business From Scratch to Success (ISBN: 978-1-119-66896-1), Founder of Food & Beverage Magazine, the leading online magazine and resource in the industry. Designer of the Bluetooth logo and recognized in Entrepreneur Magazine's "Top 40 Under 40" for founding American Wholesale Floral, Politz is also the Co-founder of the Proof Awards and the CPG Awards and a partner in numerous consumer brands across the food and beverage sector.
