Introducing sweet potato in tourist offer: Case study of Pustara Visnjica

Modern tourists are becoming more and more demanding; they are traveling more often and are turning towards specific types of tourism. Their motives are more complex and they include, among other things, different activities in nature, visiting ecologically clean areas, having meaningful tourist experiences and so on. Furthermore, the healthy lifestyle is becoming more present as well as our need to eat healthily and live in harmony with nature. Therefore, rural tourism, and especially agricultural tourism, may be defined as a tourist activity, organized by farmers who own their own family farms, which includes ecological agriculture, and it is becoming more and more important part of the tourist offer of Croatia. Sweet potato is mentioned as one of the unique agricultural products which, thanks to its nutritious and medicinal properties as well as undemanding farming requirements and full utilization, makes it ideal for growth on family farms. The growth of the sweet potato can contribute to the improvement of farming, increase the farmers’ income and through putting it in the tourist offer, it can create a recognizable image of a particular family farm. according to everything mentioned so far, the main aim of this paper is to demonstrate the cultivation of the sweet potato, its nutritious and medicinal properties, the representation of the sweet potato on the Croatian market and the ways to use it in the farms’ tourist offer by analyzing the case study of Pustara Visnjica, which was awarded the Certificate of the European destination of Excellence, EDEN, in September 2011. For the requirements of this paper, we interviewed the co-owner and director of Pustara Visnjica, aiming to determine the ways Pustara Visnjica included the sweet potato in its tourist offer, from cultivating seedlings to offering sweet potato delicacies in its restaurants. Moreover, offering agricultural products into family farms’ offers opens the possibility to improve their business success and is key for their survival in a competitive environment.