Local cuisines enrich the culture of any country. While the cuisine may be broadly defined for a country in general, variations across regions and provinces in its preparation, taste and colour do prevail. For example, a chicken curry may be representative for India, but the way it is prepared and variations that it undergoes every few kilometers apart provides interesting experiences for the connoisseurs of food. Rising incomes of people and growth of urban habitats is vastly reshaping the expanse of choices, preferences of people significantly expanding scope and extent of local cuisines, While restaurants do play a major role in furthering this diversity as also specialising in regional and provincial niches, the roadside food stalls and mobile food vans are of no less importance in pushing the momentum forward. People are interested to experiment with variety and the food industry both in the organised and unorganised sector are responding to this opportunity which is quite huge both in terms of size and significance.
Google Local Guides is an important enabler and facilitator in this momentum. As it tracks movement of individuals, it gives an opportunity to write and share on a wide range of things that a person comes across or visits. Going forward Google could explore harnessing productive commercial opportunities for the businesses by strengthening the people connect with these businesses. For instance when I write about a mobile van in visakhapatnam that serves a large variety of tasty Dosas, perhaps Google could sell its location services to that business through which all incoming visitors and tourists to Visakhapatnam could be informed of this place that could be come handy for the visitors to have a taste of this dosa that could add to the business of the mobile van. A tradeoff that works well for all the concerned.