I had a similar question and posted it here How to tag shops specialising in products from a certain country?
I understand that the consensus is that such shops should be tagged like they would be tagged in their home place (an Italian food store should be tagged like it would be if it was in Italy, for instance) and additionally with cuisine=* if it is mainly selling (processed) food and origin=* if it is mainly non-food. Is this something we could document in the wiki?
Thanks, I think that formulation captures a much more reasonable distinction than the one about prepared dishes. A grocer that specializes in ethnic foods not necessarily from a specific country can still be tagged, as they always have been, using cuisine.
I also added a mention on the Key:cuisine - OpenStreetMap Wiki page
these shops usually or often differ from shops in their owner’s home country, because they tend to offer a wider selection of goods and to be less specialized. Also the more distant they are the less likely they will be able to offer fresh and perishable foods. You won’t find an “Italian food” shop in Italy, you would find groceries, convenience stores, butchers, delis etc. You would also see that “Italian” is much less a category in Italy than “Sicilian”, “Tuscan”, or what ever other Italian region (food often is classified by region, while categories such as “Chinese” or “Italian” etc. make more sense from far away).
+1 for cuisine and origin anyway, but should not be limited to nations.
I had in mind to give some guidance on selecting the value of the shop tag: if the food it sells would be considered luxury in Italy, tag it shop+deli, if the product range is what you would find in an ordinary convenience store in Italy, tag it shop=convenience, if it sells mostly Italian meat products, tag it shop=butcher, etc. All in combination with cuisine=italian
In practice, this is true of some countries, but Italian is a common category in Italy (possibly for pan-Italian eateries):
Note that what can be sold in an ordinary convenience store in one location can be a luxury product elsewhere. For an extreme case: during communist times in Poland some products were considered as luxury goods (oranges, jeans, Coca-cola etc). While being considered as normal products at the same time in Western Europe
Yeah, in Portugal it’s also common to have restaurants specialized in “traditional Portuguese” food, tagged with cuisine=portuguese.
Btw, there’s also cuisine=traditional which probably should use a more specific tag because what it means is location-dependent… 
Yes, this is probably more relevant to the thread about cuisines for eateries, but cuisine=regional is another one that seems to have a context-dependent meaning, as in something specific to a region of the current country. That tag used to be more popular back when there were fewer cuisine values, so mappers were shyer about introducing more obscure but more descriptive values for specific regional cuisines.
Hi, i’d like to know if it’s acceptable to tag a shop with origin=local or with precise distances like origin=50km or origin=less than 100km? what about combinations like origin=bretagne;50km ?
There are a good bunch of shops in France that state their products are locally sourced - quite a vague statement in itself i agree - in regions that often don’t follow administratively or geologically delimited areas.
The term “local” is used quite extentively everywhere and would make for a good common denominator for these shops.