As Europe is continuously growing to become one of the largest unions in the world, the integration and cooperation among these many different countries is probably two of the main issues to the future European Union (EU). EU is working on improvements between the countries in many different ways. For instance, EU co-finances different EU programs through structural funds. Structural funds intend to help increase economic and social cohesion between Member States. The structural funds stand today for one third of the total EU budget1. The Culinary Heritage Europe Project is co-financed by structural funds. The project encourages and promotes tourism by supporting small businesses that work with local and regional food in rural areas. One of the main objectives of the project is to produce a best practice catalogue, which will act as a guideline for small scale businesses and their production. The Culinary Heritage Europe Project has now reached half way and is due for a half time evaluation. Instead of carry out a basic half time evaluation, we decided to see the project in a theoretical perspective. After studied the project carefully we started to see a connection between the project and benchmarking, which is a method to learn from others. We also realised that the project has connections to European integration and communication. Therefore we decided to investigate the project from these points of views. To gain as useful information as possible regarding the project, a questionnaire was designed on the basis of the three theories. To assure content of the answers received and to get a greater depth in our thesis, we also made interviews. The collected information was interpreted, but as a result of the project complexity and scope we have been carefully to draw precise conclusions. Instead we have introduced overall suggestions of improvements to The Culinary Heritage Europe Project and to similar projects. As we see it, one of the main underlying concerns of the project is in the planning process. Many problems that have appeared can be derived to this process, in which they also could have been prevented. Enough resources have to be set aside to do the planning process, where most of the project guidelines are set. There should be a common understanding among the regions of what to improve and how to improve it together. As the research will show, the project is not completing all the steps that consortium benchmarking theory suggests. The project does not include any implementation. This might cause a risk that the best practice catalogue ends in theoretical proposals and few actual improvements. We therefore stress the need for the project to follow a benchmarking plan and comply with it from the beginning to the end. www.nutek.se, 2004-12-07