The food and drink industry landscape continues to change. The challenges are many. They include sourcing new products, complying with increasingly onerous food safety rules and regulations, addressing environmental concerns, and fulfilling both retailer and consumer expectations.

Competitive pressures from other large food and drink producing nations are placing a premium on effective innovation strategies for product, process and systems development to anticipate consumer needs and attract follow-through investment.

KPMG’s Food & Drink is one of the primary industry sectors within our Consumer Markets practice. We are leaders in serving the entire food and drink value chain: agribusiness, food manufacturing and processing, distribution, and retail trade through stores and restaurants.

In addition, our professionals are committed to devising and helping to implement specific strategies that help our clients attain and maintain a leading role in their markets.

The old cuisines are the best. Leave people in the same general place for a thousand years or more, and they’ll figure out what’s good to eat. Migration and fusion add something to food, of course, but there’s no substitute for a millennium of culinary experiment, and that’s what attracts New American chefs to Santa Fe and fusionists to Chinese and Indian food, and even what provides some of the underlying savor of Italian food.

Peru has had high civilizations as long as anywhere has. Besides bringing us the potato (and quinoa), the country had a lot to do with the development of chili peppers, peanuts, squashes, beans, and corn. Add a Spanish colonial history, immigrant populations from Asia and Europe, and a few Afro-Peruvians, and you have quite a cuisine in Lima, and some very tasty food at Machu Picchu, a 15-table storefront in Somerville.

Peru is known worldwide for its extensive and varied menu and in the South America is rivalled only by Mexico in terms of variety of its cuisine. International food is served throughout Peru, but those wishing to sample traditional Peruvian dishes will not be disappointed.

In Peru, lunch is the main meal of the day and is normally served between 12.30pm to 1pm. Dinner is served from 7pm on, although when Peruvians have guests, dinner is customarily served at 8pm.

As Peruvian cuisine varies from region to region, the following pages will highlight specialities from each region. The tour begins with traditional dishes from the Highlands.