Over the weekend of May 28 and 29, the Milford Food Truck Festival occurred at Eisenhower Park in Milford involving more than 100 different food trucks, local businesses and vendors. This was the second year for the event.
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The festival’s opening on Saturday faced complications with parking and overcrowding. An overwhelming amount of walk-up ticket sales combined with pre-sold ticket buyers to create huge crowds, long lines at trucks and in some cases, food trucks running out of food according to many attendees who took to the Festival’s Facebook Event Page to register their discontent.
Tickets to the Festival were sold online in the weeks leading up to the event for $2, with walk up tickets at $3.
In April, organizers advertised on Facebook that pre-sale tickets for the event included parking and were sold in gated timeslots of 11 a.m., 1 p.m. and 3 p.m. The staggered times were designed to aid in keeping parking available and lines limited. Saturday attendees arriving after noon found that the parking was full and they would need to park at Platt Technical High School and walk a quarter mile in the 86 degree Fahrenheit heat. There was no differentiation in parking for pre-sale or walk-up tickets, nor was there an available shuttle service for the disabled or elderly attendees.
Festival goers also raised issue with the check in process for tickets, with pre-sold tickets and walk-up ticket sales blending together to create difficulty for organizers and attendees. People with pre-sold tickets still had to wait in line with the walk-ins, just to gain access to the festival as there was no separate check-in line or expidited entry.
Festival staff also reported one occurrence of an attendee suffering from heat stroke. Directors confirmed that the person was quickly treated by ambulances on the scene.
The festival rebounded on Sunday, with smaller crowds making for a more relaxed scene. According to Festival director Rob Craven, Saturday’s scene could be attributed to a small change on Facebook’s event listings and the change from last years Festival going from a pre-sold ticket event to an event in which people could buy tickets in advance and at the door.
“We talked to a lot of event organizers around the state and we do a few shows as well and Facebook has made some changes to events that has made it a little bit more difficult with the new “interested” feature,” remarked Craven.
“Typically events like ours and event organizers we work with to promote typically see the “going” on Facebook and that is what you typically end up with. So when we see 6000 people going over a two day event where we do 4000 a day comfortably we felt comfortable, plus we had only around 1000 pre sold tickets, so it’s the best you can do to take your best guess. Unfortunately this time was one of those anomalies where there’s just a bunch of people coming who don’t say that their going on social media, or they are bringing their family and friends so that’s why we’re going to have to consider going back to a pre-event registration to ensure that we know we have exactly the amount of people that will fit comfortably in the park so we know that people will have a great time.”
The Festival’s Facebook event page had listed 20,500 people as clicking “interested” in the event while 5,864 people had clicked “going”.
While the festival organizers were relying on Facebook for determining their attendance, the time and location for the event were advertised in regional media and websites. People discovering the festival through those avenues or through word of mouth may not have even been overly aware of the reliance on Facebook for scheduling and simply arrived at the venue ready to eat.
While Craven mentioned that the change from advance ticket sales only to both advance and walk up ticket sales this year was due to requests from last years attendees, he recognized that this change “resulted in what happened Saturday so yes definitely more people came out than what we expected. The way we will fix that next time would be to make it a ticketed event like we did the first time.”
The Orange Times editor, Joseph Cole, attended the Milford Food Truck Festival on Saturday, May 28, as a pre-sale ticket holder and contributed to this story.
