84 New Foods, One Very Loud Week: A Look at the 2026 Iowa State Fair

The 2026 Iowa State Fair ran August 13 through 23, and it closed on Sunday still leaving me short of breath. Over a million people came through the gates. Eighty-four brand new foods debuted. I run a freeze-drying company in Iowa City, so for me the fair is not exactly a vacation. It is eleven days of heat, ice, and strangers tasting a freeze-dried strawberry for the first time and deciding they need to make their own.

Bryon and I took the kids for a day, and I did what I always do, which is lose two hours working the sampling stations like it is a job. Then I walked the grounds again the next morning with my vendor hat on, because the fair looks like a completely different place depending on which hat you are wearing.

The Food Is Still the Main Event

Eighty-four new foods across nearly 200 food stands. Four new vendors and five new food stands debuted this year. And forty-five new drinks, ranging from dirty sodas to a Frozen Red Bull Watermelon Margarita and a PBJ beer that sounds like a dare someone made in a parking lot.

The Best New Food finalists were the Ultimate Minneapple Pie at $14, the All-American Scrambled Egg Roll at $15, and the Porky Parm Gnocchi at $14. I had strong opinions about all three and the budget to back exactly one of them, which is roughly how these decisions go.

Here is the honest part: most new fair foods are one-week wonders. Deep-fried, syrup-soaked, on a stick, built to be photographed and then inhaled at a picnic table with a stack of napkins. That is not a knock on them. It is just the business model. When Bryon suggested we debut a freeze-dried something on a stick, I had to remind him that our entire pitch is that our snack still tastes like something in March.

The Attendance Numbers Are Wild

The all-time daily record used to belong to a Friday in 2001, when 115,703 people squeezed through the gates in a single day. In 2026, day three hit 125,067 and day four hit 123,140, setting a new all-time daily record. I was on the grounds for one of those crush days, and I can confirm that a record-setting crowd does not feel festive at 1 p.m. It feels like a fire code conversation.

And over a million people came through the gates across the full eleven days. I have been going to this fair my whole life, summer after summer, Lake McBride in the morning and the fairgrounds in the afternoon, and I have never seen a week like this one. By the last weekend, the Grandstand chatter had replaced Kinnick in every conversation at our kitchen table.

What a Snack Company Notices

Walking the fair as a vendor is different from walking it as a customer. You stop looking at the food and start looking at the operations. How the queues snake and where they back up. Where the sampling stations sit so the line does not choke the midway. What packaging survives six hours in August heat without turning into a puddle of regret.

Heat is the enemy of every product on those grounds. Chocolate gives up. Fresh fruit goes soft by noon. Ice melts faster than the stands can restock it. Anything shelf-stable has a genuine advantage, and I say that knowing exactly how self-interested it sounds, because it is also simply true. When you have watched a pallet of freeze-dried strawberries sit happily through a ninety-degree Iowa afternoon, you stop apologizing for the pitch.

I watched a lot of people meet a freeze-dried strawberry this year, and the face they make never changes. There is a pause, then a crunch, then the slow realization that the thing they thought was a chip is actually fruit. I sell the company, so take my enthusiasm with a grain of salt, but that moment is genuinely the best part of the job.

I will not pretend I was an impartial observer. I run the freeze-drying business. Our production runs kept humming all week back in Iowa City while I walked the grounds, which is exactly why our snacks show up at flea markets in August without a cooler. The fair week rewarded the vendors who thought about August in February, and honestly, that is the only kind of vendor I want to be.

My kids' verdict on the whole week was that the Frozen Red Bull Watermelon Margarita needed more frozen and less watermelon. I gave them one ceremonial sip, Bryon made a face that could power a city block, and I defended the concept on principle. This is our marriage.

The fair is the one week a year when Iowa shows up in full voice and then charges you $14 for a pie. I am already thinking about next year and what we might bring that survives the heat, the walk back to the parking lot, and the drive home. Until then, I am going to go check on a production run.

Stay curious. Stay crunchy. Stay cosmic.

— Sara Jane Shelvock, CEO, Torus Coffee Company LLC