Toronto seems to have about 5 food festival failures every summer. The last one I remember being everywhere on social media was a grilled cheese one. But there are numerous food truck ones where almost everyone runs out of food or line ups are multi-hour affairs.

I'd thought it an impossible task to put on a good food based festival for a long time but Gilroy did a pretty good job with their Garlic festival. The trick seemed to be have about 5 stalls for every vendor and stick them in opposite edges so if the line is long at the Garlic Ice Cream booth you just keep walking around the edge a bit to the next booth from the same company selling the same stuff.

> where almost everyone runs out of food or line ups are multi-hour affairs.

Yeah, this seems to be getting more common (maybe because the people running the festivals make a nice profit?).

I was at a hot wings festival recently. In a two-hour line for 4 wings. Then they ran out of wings, beer, and all liquids, including water. It ended up being ~$10/wing, 1 wing/hour.

I heard about that one. Paul McCartney didn't show up because his band was on the run, so he flew like an eagle. But fortunately a mellifluous Chinese vocalist showed up and sang a song. [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6g_jP00I38

Portland Oregon has pretty good food (and beer) festivals regularly, and I think the key thing is that there's a pretty heavy organizational overlap with city-run yearly 'county fair' type festivals - down to repurposing the same ticketing schemes from rides for food instead - just with the higher-class restaurateurs involved replacing the usual 'fair food' grease-and-fries types.

I've always wanted to go to that festival. Maybe next year.

I've seen some pretty epic failures, especially if they do good early on and get too much exposure. There was a garlic festival in the Hudson Valley that got way too much exposure on Food Network and was turned into an overcrowded nightmare. (Amplified by the number of Manhattanitrs out of their native environment)

Another one was a food truck festival where they spread the thing out too wide, so you had to be on a death march to actually see everything!

The Gilroy Garlic Festival has been running for decades now. They've had plenty of time to work out the bugs.

I had a mean garlic milkshake in Gilroy once, not bad at all but easily generates looks of horror on others' faces.

Birmingham, AL (US) must be really lucky with their festival scene. They have several significant festivals every year:

Sidewalk Film Festival

Sloss Fest

Brew Fest

Slice Fest

Secret Stages

I'm not sure if it is the local support or that they're just smaller. I expect we may have had a lot of excellent event organizers with solid experience looking for new jobs after City Stages wound down. City Stages was a 20+ year music festival that was generally successful logistically, but wasn't profitable.

When you think of it, though. If there are 5+ 10-20k attendance festivals every year in every metro area over 500k there are bound to be some regular screwups.

And port-o-potties always suck.

London has a proud tradition of failed festivals. See:

OktoberFest London 2015 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/shopping-and-consumer-news/1...

Jabberwocky (I had tickets to this) http://www.nme.com/news/music/various-artists-2392-1244501

I remember at least another one which was cancelled on the day due to overcrowding which I can't seem to find right now.

Bloc? https://www.theguardian.com/music/2012/jul/07/bloc-weekend-s...

Beer festivals are another common FUBAR scenario, particularly when rare, high-demand brews are involved.

http://www.tampabay.com/things-to-do/food/spirits/cigar-city...

To be fair to Cigar City, they learned their lesson and as far as I've heard, subsequent festivals were great.

also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DashCon