Rescaling terroir through virtual identity work and impression management.

A powerful cultural concept not easily translated into English, terroir both contains and communicates valuable associations about place. Because terroir is an important way to communicate with US consumers, food producers work to draw upon valuable associations between food products and their particular places of origin. In this paper, I put forward a notion of terroir as a conceptual terrain onwhich artisan food entrepreneurs negotiate with the potentially fraught relationship between the place where their food products originate and the associations that US consumers might have about those particular places. This in-depth case study analysis examines the complete collection of a transnational gourmet food company's commercial Facebook posts (N = 1485) in order to illustrate how a food-producing firm both creates and revises its virtual identity online through strategic attention to terroir. Because few studies have examined the virtual strategies of artisan food producers with regard to the emplacement of terroir, this project undertakes a richly descriptive case study design by focusing on a transnational specialty food firm based in Indonesia. Its analysis suggests that artisan entrepreneurs can strategically rescale terroir in order to create positive (and therefore, valuable) associations in the face of potentially negative ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]