The EPCOT International Food & Wine Festival has been a fixture of Florida fall life for three decades, but anyone who attended in its early years would barely recognize what it's become. The Disney Food Blog team has been covering the event since 2009 — making 2026 their 17th consecutive year — and they've tracked every booth addition, calendar expansion, and menu oddity along the way.
When the festival launched in 1996, it ran for roughly 30 days and felt more like a traveling culinary convention than the sprawling, park-wide celebration it is today. By 2009, small plates were priced between $2 and $7, and the programming leaned heavily into wine education, celebrity chef dinners, culinary seminars, and signature events like Party for the Senses. Over 25 international marketplaces participated that year, and the whole affair was closely anchored to World Showcase. The 2026 edition, by contrast, runs from August 27th through November 21st, spans more than 30 Global Marketplaces, and offers over 100 new menu items alongside 30 returning or reimagined dishes chosen to mark the festival's 30th anniversary.
The calendar stretch has been one of the most dramatic shifts. A 53-day run in 2014 was considered record-setting at the time. By 2017 the festival hit 75 days and featured 35 Marketplace booths. The pandemic year of 2021 pushed things furthest, with Food & Wine running from July 15th through November 20th — more than four months. Geography expanded too, with the 2015 festival's 20th-anniversary edition being a turning point: booths moved into the former Future World for the first time, with concepts like Sustainable Chew and Cheese Studio staking out new territory.
Menu creativity evolved just as visibly. The TERRA vegan marketplace debuted in 2012 — well ahead of the broader plant-based trend. Scotland arrived in 2013 with vegetarian haggis and Scotch flights. Remy's Ratatouille Hide & Squeak scavenger hunt launched in 2015, giving non-eaters a reason to wander World Showcase. And Emile's Fromage Montage, which debuted in 2019 as a cheese crawl with passport stamps and a prize for completion, remains a fan favorite — its pitch essentially being an award for eating cheese, which is difficult to argue with.
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This retrospective was originally published by the Disney Food Blog, which has covered the EPCOT International Food & Wine Festival every year since 2009.
