Adelaide Food Fringe update for 2022 and beyond

On behalf of the Adelaide Food Fringe team, we want to express our deepest appreciation to all of our sponsors, venues, and supporters for a wonderful run.

Unfortunately, we have been forced to make the difficult decision to cancel the festival indefinitely. This decision was based on a combination of things including looming deadlines, lead times, staffing, but ultimately our financial sustainability has made it just too difficult to continue to deliver the best possible version of the Adelaide Food Fringe festival in 2022 and beyond.

Over the last 9 months, we have explored a scaled down model that might see the Adelaide Food Fringe survive this year on our shoestring budget. The reality is, however, any model would’ve resulted in a significant reduction in the scale, scope, impact and value of what we would provide businesses, communities, councils, organisations and individuals that register events in our program in addition to the value we could offer partners investing in us.

We do not want to produce anything less than we achieved last year or indeed any budget/staffing compromised version. Thus, inspired by Ash Barty, we have made the decision to go out on a high with not only immense pride in what we achieved but also by initiating one last positive impact through the festival.

As part of our closing we will be donating $10,000 of our earned reserves to our charity partner, Foodbank SA, to further our festival’s commitment to supporting their mission to help people experiencing food insecurity. This will create 20,000 meals, continuing our commitment in supporting Foodbank SA in the past 3 years and will be a part of our festival’s final forthcoming thank you and goodbye announcement.

We will be leaving a small amount in the budget to maintain the website, admin and contingencies until 1 Jan 2023 in the miracle event that we secure a significant grant to enable us to revive the Adelaide Food Fringe and come back bigger and better.

Festivals, events and hospitality have been some of the hardest hit the last 3 years and as a festival that’s a combination of all three, the Adelaide Food Fringe’s timing couldn’t have been worse.

Despite the difficulties, we are proud of what we achieved and will forever be thankful to the support we received from every single person who was involved, who attended, and who supported our festival celebration of SA food and beverage businesses, communities, clubs, organisations and individuals.

We hope this is “thank you and goodbye, for now”