Between Authenticity and Institutional Recognition: Authenticity Discourse around Van Herbed Cheese in Online Visitor Reviews

Abstract

Van Herbed Cheese is registered as a geographical indication by the Turkish Patent and Trademark Office (Registration No. 405, 2018) and is regarded as the signature product of the Van breakfast tradition. To examine how this institutional authenticity claim is confirmed in actual visitor experience, this study analyzed 98 real visitor reviews collected via Google Maps from ten businesses in Van province (eight breakfast establishments and two retail herbed-cheese sellers), coded line by line using a pre-designed ten-dimension scheme (objective authenticity, general taste/abundance, cheese-specific sensory quality, table sociality, place attachment, expectation gap, on-site hygiene/trust, remote-purchase trust, and memory/nostalgia). Findings show that expectation gap is the strongest and most stable predictor of visitor rating (mean rating difference: −2.72), a relationship that remained virtually unchanged when the corpus was expanded from 37 to 98 reviews. The coding scheme displayed strong structural sensitivity to venue type: general taste/abundance appeared in 85.0% of breakfast-establishment reviews but almost never in retail reviews (5.6%), while remote-purchase trust appeared exclusively among retail sellers (44.4%). Remote-purchase trust and memory/nostalgia frequently co-occurred in the retail context, with visitors often purchasing the product remotely in search of a flavor tasted years earlier. Place attachment, by contrast, shifted from a simple positive association in the smaller sample to a more complex pattern as the corpus grew, revealing that visitors can evaluate location independently of product or service quality. These results indicate that the legal registration of a geographical indication does not guarantee a consistent authenticity experience at the point of consumption, and that authenticity is continuously reconstructed in the tension between institutional and individual verification.