CUSTOMERS WILL CLOG STREETS TO BUY A CONE OF COOKIES FROM SWEET MARTHA’S COOKIE JAR. | PHOTO BY JONATHAN MAZE
E very year, in the 12 days leading to Labor Day, about 2 million people will walk through the gates of the Minnesota State Fair. Most of the people who visit come just once. A few visit more than once. And then there are people like Mike Henderson. Each morning of the event, Henderson boards a bus near his St. Paul home and rides it to the fairgrounds. He’ll spend six to eight hours there. “What better way is there to get your Fitbit steps in?” he said. In 2021, he walked more than 371,000 steps and 174 miles over those 12 days. Henderson has his favorite foods, like the Gizmo Sandwich, a ground beef and Italian sausage behemoth covered in red sauce and melted cheese. He will try many of the new foods at the fair every year, sometimes sharing them with friends, many of whom are frequent fairgoers themselves. He knows the secrets to avoiding some of the long lines that develop when the event gets busy, though he refuses to divulge what they are, for fear that they will no longer be secrets. “You get inside those fairgrounds, and you’re in a different world,” he said. “Everything that’s going on in the world you block out. It’s its own little unique universe. It’s a great way to escape reality.” The Minnesota State Fair isn’t the biggest state fair in the country, but it does have the distinction of being the most intense. More than 150,000 people, on average, will walk through one of the fair’s entrances every day over that 12- day period, about 50% more than the State Fair of Texas, which runs for about a month. The busiest days can bring in 250,000 or more. More than 270,000 people visited the event one Saturday in 2018. There are some 1,000 vendors at the fair, everything from a Shamwow towel sales booth to a Slingshot ride that hurls two riders 200 feet in the air at $40 per person. There are grandstand concerts and 4H demonstrations along with the requisite farm animals and carnival rides. Yet nobody talks about what infomercial booth they visited at the fair. They always talk about what they ate. They plan in advance, scour the Blue Ribbon Bargain Book for deals, analyze the fair’s annual announcement of new food items, and scrutinize reviews in local publications or on social media. Everybody has their selection of items they try every year, and maybe one or two new items they want to try. And then like Mike Henderson, they try and walk it all off. The Minnesota State Fair is, as much as anything else, a food event.
The Minnesota State Fair can bring in 2 million visitors over a 12-day period. For the food vendors, it can be big business, where a cookie stand can make as much as an In-N-Out restaurant does in a year.
BY JONATHAN MAZE
JONATHAN.MAZE@INFORMA.COM
OCTOBER 2025 RESTAURANT BUSINESS
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