How America took a bite out of food festivals

It seems like every city in America is hosting some kind of food festival these days.

There are the odd ones, like the Gilroy Garlic Festival, first launched in 1979, and the Waikiki Spam Jam, formerly held in Austin, Minn., home of Hormel Foods. Then there are the mac dads, like the Taste of Chicago, the nation’s largest, which has drawn nearly 4 million visitors in recent years, and the trendy Food & Wine Classic in Aspen, which costs $2,950 a ticket.

Perhaps a sign that we’ve reached peak food festival, one of the nation’s most revered food and drink events, our Food Network’s New York Wine and Food Festival (NYCWF), is making a historic move this week from Manhattan piers. West Side at the Brooklyn Army Terminal in Sunset Park. How much it will fill the municipality’s coffers remains to be seen, but business leaders could not be more enthusiastic. “Sixty-two million people visit New York City each year, and only 15 million make it to Brooklyn,” said Randy Peers, President and CEO of the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce. “How could the restaurant scene and the community at large not benefit” from the arrival of NYCWF?

With more than 100 restaurants participating in 80 demos, dinners and parties — not to mention dedicated ferries from Manhattan — Peers, a self-described “lifelong optimist,” may well be celebrating a new location of successful on closing day in October. 20.

Now officially part of American pop culture, food and wine festivals often make waves beyond their core food and drink product. According to researcher Edwin N. Torres, a former professor at the University of South Florida, “As visitors, foodies and locals experience the offerings of a food and wine festival, they develop a strong sense of community. . . [and] connection to host destinations.”

And Brooklyn may well be the next big beneficiary of this phenomenon.

Food and wine festivals are nothing new. Historians trace the trend of celebrating local produce and cuisine back to around the Great Depression, when money was tight and neighbors relied on potlucks to stay fed. There is no official tally of how many such events exist in America today, but the website Bestfoodanddrinkevents.com allows visitors to search among more than 1,600 festivals in 50 states that have more than 1,000 attendees annually. And they’re not including the weirdest ones, like West Virginia’s Roadkill Cook-Off, whose culinary offerings were recently described as “featuring an animal normally found dead on the side of a highway. For example: snake, armadillo, groundhog, possum or squirrel.

The food festival trend really began to take off in 1984, when Tom Ryder, then president of American Express Publishing, used his newly acquired Food & Wine Magazine to create a small concept event at the center of summer, destination driven in Aspen. “Cities around the country may have done smaller versions of something similar,” says Dana Cowin, who was editor-in-chief of Food & Wine for 21 years. “But his idea of ​​using summer to turn a ski town into a summer travel destination was novel. And remember, we didn’t have celebrity chefs yet.”

After that the festival scene really started to heat up. The Food & Wine Classic in June in Aspen filled its roster with Food & Wine magazine’s top chefs and restaurants. Cowin says she would plan her entire editorial calendar around the event, which she and her staff dubbed “Chef Camp.”

“There were only 4,000 ticket holders, mostly our readers, in a small, beautiful town for three days, so you could easily bump into a chef you knew at lunch,” she recalls.

The Aspen event was affected by — but survived — COVID, which has crippled many festivals in states with stricter social distancing rules. The Aspen festival’s taxable sales in June 2019 were $66 million, with $18 million of that in lodging and $11 million in restaurants and bars. In the same month in 2020, the numbers fell to $51.9 million in taxable sales, with $6 million in lodging and $8 million in the restaurant and bar industry. That’s still a lot of spending for just a few thousand people. Charleston Wine + Food, on the other hand, has generated $170.5 million in economic impact for the Charleston area since its inception in 2005, or about $9 million (and 35,000 attendees) annually on average.

Despite its small size, Aspen has been extremely influential, especially with the launch of the Food Network in 1993 and America’s addiction to cooking shows and celebrity chefs. And so naturally, the concept was repeated. In Charlotte. In Charleston. In Austin. You name it. Many have attracted a local or regional crowd, but the larger ones can attract national visitors, having a significant impact on the local economy.

“People are arriving for the event, they’re populating the hotels, every meal is an opportunity to eat out,” says Steven Carvell, a finance professor at Cornell University’s School of Hotel Administration. “That’s what generates money.”

It also directs media attention to the destination, as well as to the chefs and restaurants themselves, he says.

“The cost of customer acquisition has gone up a lot, so these high-profile festivals can be an efficient way to build a [city and chef] fan base,” notes Carvell.

The wine and food festival scene went truly national when Lee Schrager, chief commercial officer at Southern Glasers Wine & Spirits, one of the nation’s largest alcohol distributors, was invited by friends to attend the Aspen Classic 25 years ago. seen. On the flight home, he scratched an idea for a Miami version and pitched it to his company—launching the South Beach Wine and Food Festival in 2002.

“There was nothing in South Beach back then,” Schrager laments. “I knew that to be successful, we needed a superstar name, but I didn’t know how to contact Alain Ducasse or Bobby Flay.”

A friend hooked him up with the former, and he somehow convinced the multi-Michelin-starred French chef to take on the title. He also found willing partners who believed in what he was trying to create. “Miami Beach gave us the beach for free, they waived the permit fees,” Schrager recalled. “Having a good one [local] the partner is the most important thing.” That first year, 6,000 participants came. Last year, 65,000 did so.

Everyone involved benefited. According to research conducted by the Greater Miami Convention and Visitors Bureau, this year’s SOBEWFF generated $31.2 million in economic impact and supported 6,238 jobs in the community. Since its early days, the nonprofit event has raised $40 million for Florida International University’s Chaplin School of Hospitality and Tourism Management.

Buoyed by the success of the Miami festival, Schrager launched the New York Food and Wine Festival in 2005. Nearly 20 years later, Schrager believes it will continue to be a success in Brooklyn, but admits the landscape has changed.

“It’s not the same as 25 years ago, when there were only three major festivals” and few celebrity chefs, he admits. “However, we provide transportation and kitchens and ingredients.” But, Shrager adds, “never the talent,” which is ultimately the chefs themselves.

It now partners with the Food Network, which helps with viewership, as well as hotels, airlines and local tourism boards. Last year NYWFF reached 39,000 visitors in total.

Above all, Schrager looks for up-and-coming chefs who may be promoting a book or opening a new restaurant or launching a product, or simply have something intriguing to offer.

“I have FOUND new talent at festivals? No,” says Schrager. “Have I promoted young talent? Yes.” He had Giada De Laurentiis and Alton Brown on his roster some 18 years ago – today they are household names.

This year, Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre is hosting the NYWFF opening party, Rachael Ray’s much-loved Blue Moon Burger Bash. But there are plenty of chefs participating that many may never have heard of.

Camille Becerra, the chef-partner at As You Are at Ace Hotel Brooklyn, is hosting a dinner with fellow chef (and TV cooking show judge) Amanda Freitag, and also has a book, Bright Cooking, just out hit the shelves. “In my entire career, this was the first time I was asked to participate in the festival,” says Becerra. Which makes sense.

In addition to being heavily male-dominated, the food world has become, in recent decades, run by celebrity chefs. “My world as a chef has never crossed any of those worlds,” says Becerra. However, she is a beloved chef from New York who has the power to change the minds of epicureans. “We’re entering a really wonderful phase in food,” she says. “Food is pop culture now.”

With chefs as literal rock stars, there’s little reason to believe that festivals like those in the big four destinations (Aspen, New York City, Miami, Chicago) won’t inspire more and more copycats.

At some point, however, the chefs will be disappointed with the diminishing returns of traveling to the country to endear themselves to fans, a festival insider said. But for now—when scoring a ticket plus arranging travel and dining reservations can be the same price as a Taylor Swift ticket—these festivals can offer serious value and fun.

Whether they can sustain the move to industrial Brooklyn remains a mystery. Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce colleagues say moving the New York festival to Brooklyn “is to some extent very much an experiment.”