Dullinger said. And it wants the vendors to know what they’re doing. This isn’t the place to get your start. “We do bring in 2 million people over the course of 12 days,” she said. “We need you to be able to keep up.” The fair looks for unique products. There are eight new vendors this year, including alcohol-free drink vendor Urban Glow Mocktails, taking advantage of a huge drink trend right now. There are new vendors featuring lumpia, or Filipino fried spring rolls, one that serves Hungarian chimney cakes that are filled with ice cream or other treats, coffee and beignets, and a Jamaican vendor that serves oxtail. Plenty of the food, both new items being offered and those from new vendors, is fried, such as the “Tater Kegs” from Greater Tater, or jumbo, fried tater tots in flavors like bacon
jalapeno, reuben and “cheese bomb.” Not all of it is fried, and that’s just the way the fair likes it. “What’s very cool about fairs, a lot of them do have these fried options,” Dullinger said. “We’re not hating on those at all. But we’ve found we’re not just the freaky fried fair food fest. We truly are a place to try unique culinary items.” But it does help that the food can be enjoyed while walking. “On a stick is very important,” Dullinger said. There are about 80 items on a stick, including deep fried cookie dough, falafel, pork chops, salad, hot dish and alligator sausage. New stick-held items this year include Shrimp and Pork toast on a stick and “Grandma Doreen’s Dessert Dog” featuring vanilla ice cream between two pieces of coffee cake, on a stick.
Healthy does help, and the fair is scattered with vegetarian and vegan options such as hummus bowls. And the fair also reflects Minnesota’s increasingly diverse population, so there is more Hmong, Somali and Caribbean options. “We want to make sure you can experience your own food here at the fair,” said Dullinger, who admits that, as someone who is at the fair every day, having some healthier options is a good thing. The fair is older than the state itself—it was founded as a territory fair in 1854—and it’s been located in the same spot halfway between Minneapolis and St. Paul since 1885, a spot that is now landlocked. Mapping that site with new items and addressing the needs of those 2 million people, while achieving the variety and balance the fair wants, can be
THE MINNESOTA STATE FAIR CAN BRING ENORMOUS CROWDS, ESPECIALLY ON WEEKENDS. | PHOTO BY JONATHAN MAZE
difficult. “It’s like a puzzle piece,” Dullinger said. Vendors frequently start with small locations and, if they are successful, can graduate into bigger locations, more locations or both. The Pronto Pups are sold in eight small sites scattered throughout the fair. It generated $2.3 million from those eight sites last year, according to the fair. Pickles are popular. The Perfect Pickle, which has two sites and specializes in fried pickles, among other things, made $1.5 million from two sites last year. Then there’s Rick’s Pizza, which started selling a pickle pizza in 2022, generating consistent lines that could span a block or two. They didn’t die down in subsequent years. “He’s putting out as much product as he can as quickly as
possible,” Dullinger said. “He actually cannot serve any more out of that trailer.” He has now earned a second trailer. But the biggest success story of the fair belongs to a now-retired art teacher. Martha Rossini and her business partners ran a small frozen yogurt shop in downtown Minneapolis in 1978. They applied for a spot at the fair but were denied that year because the fair already had frozen yogurt. The next year, they added a second application, for cookies, using the chocolate chips they had on hand for the shop. Rossini got the phone call about a month before the start of the fair. “I hung up and basically screamed,” she said. “I was so thrilled.” The problem? She didn’t have a cookie recipe. Rossini cobbled one together from
her mother’s recipes, including a “secret ingredient” that gives the cookies their flavor. She also knew that she wanted to serve the cookies hot, noting that all the desserts in her household would be gone before they cooled off. “So many people love those warm cookies,” Rossini said. They opened a “stick stand,” a 9-by-11 white booth selling paper cones stacked with warm cookies. A friend down the block made the dough in a mixer and carried the dough to the stand, where they used a Kook- e-King machine to make the dough balls and baked them at a rate of 200 cookies every 12 minutes. They offered cookies on napkins to passersby as free samples. “They’d walk away a few steps, eat the cookie, and then
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