With a little proactive collaboration from the government and food producers, South Africa can use the one thing it has in spades -- culture -- to generate economic opportunities.

Businesses create value through transformation, and doing so can be a fairly simple process. You add value to wheat by milling it into flour. You add value to flour by baking it into bread. You can add value to bread by innovating it -- into a French baguette, an artisanal sourdough boule, or square crustless loaves perfectly packaged for school lunches.

Transformation and innovation occur in response to customer demand, market research, technological breakthroughs or eureka moments by clever marketers.

But there's another mechanism of value creation that's often overlooked -- beneficiation through culture and cultural heritage.

How does culture create value?

Culture is most often used downstream -- when selling or marketing a brand or product. Advertisers tap into trends and piggyback off contemporary culture whenever possible. After all, a cultural hit becomes a market hit, as the brand strategist Ana Andjelic so eloquently argues.

However, in South Africa culture is seldom used to innovate upstream -- at a category level. Some industries and countries, such as Italy and Japan, have been tapping into culture to transform and add upstream value to produce for centuries.

Italy...