Swadlincote International Food & Drink Festival

Last weekend (the 13th, 14th & 15th October) was Swadlincotes annual food and drink festival. I’ve been to a few localish food fairs and festivals over the last few months, most notably the monthly Bustler street food market in Derby, and I’ve had some pretty good experiences and enjoyed a really nice variety of decent quality foods and drinks. Barring that, and the fact that this years festival was supposed to be bigger and better than previous years, in mind I had fairly high hopes for the Swadlincote food and drink festival. Unfortunately after visiting the festival and spending an hour or so wandering around taking in the sights, sounds and smells I was left feeling somewhat underwhelmed.

There was a fair number of stalls, I definitely couldn’t argue with the turnout, however rather than there being a huge variety of different foods and drinks available there was just a plethora of same old, same old. There was 4 different stalls literally just offering roast pork cobs, with little to no variation between each stall, and it was the same for cheap frozen “gourmet” burgers, “premium” hot dogs, noodles etc. This is what the bulk of the festival was made up of and it appeared to be what the organisers had given priority to. These stalls seemed to have been given the largest pitches right in the center of the market, where they would get the highest footfall.

That’s not to say that there wasn’t a few good stalls, offering something a little different or of a higher quality, but these had been pushed out onto the fringes of the festival, some situated on smaller side streets with very little space and considerably lower footfall. In my opinion these are stalls that the festival should have been about, they should have been show cased and given pride of place. A food and drink festival should be about celebrating variety and celebrating artisanal food & drink producers, not pushing the same old mass produced thing and branding it as “gourmet” or “premium”.