33rd Annual Strawberry Festival
jul 13, 2024 at 9:00 aM
July 13 @ 9:00 am - 4:00 pm | FREE
Presented by Downtown Billings and Visit Billings: The annual Strawberry Festival is Billings largest vendor street festival. This long-time cherished community event kicks off the summer event season in the heart of our City’s urban center. You’ll experience a rich diversity in arts and crafts, the scents of food-truck fare (from French Crepes, noodle bowls, to BBQ), and live street entertainment as over 100 merchants fill the streets of downtown Billings. The Strawberry festival draws a crowd from all over the northwest region to Downtown Billings (under Skypoint at 2nd Ave N. and N. Broadway) offering fun activities for all ages.
Despite its name, the Strawberry Festival is and has always been a vendor street fair with arts and craft and food vendors alike. Billings’ Strawberry Festival began as an early June event that kicked off the downtown Summer event season. Despite its name, the Strawberry Festival is and has always been a vendor street fair bursting with commercial merchants, arts and craft vendors, and food vendors and not a farmers market. Over the decades our team have tried various ways to incorporate the festival’s namesake into the event: For nearly twenty years the late Ziggy Ziegler, a founder of the Downtown Billings Association (DBA), wandered the festival in a large rubber strawberry costume and a group of chefs and cooks worked with Albertsons to craft a sixty-foot strawberry shortcake on-site to later sell by the slice as a fundraiser. The Strawberry man costume was retired from the festival when Ziegler himself retired in 2019 and the giant shortcake became an item of the past when the festival returned in July post COVID in 2021.
Having strawberries at the Strawberry Festival has proven itself a challenge for years. Unlike huckleberry or sugar beets, strawberries are not a common Montana crop and our organization has struggled to find consistent and ripe berries to sell at the festival. So, after 28 years of coordinating the early June festival, our hard working team grew tired of the inconsistent June weather literally raining or even snowing on our efforts and the day’s fun. When the festival returned in July 2021, after a one year COVID hiatus, we sought their board approval to permanently relocate the festival to July. The new early July date has offered more consistent weather, larger crowds, more vendors, and allowed the Strawberry Festival and HarvestFest to bookend the Yellowstone Valley Farmers Market Season. With the one downside of the new date being that by early July, we’ve sort of missed the prime ‘Strawberry Season’ and haven’t had much luck in our efforts to bring in fresh pallets of strawberries to the Strawberry festival.
And so…The Strawberry Festival is an Arts & Craft, Merchant, and Food Truck Festival where nearly 1/2 of the vendors in the festival have some sort of strawberry themed product or strawberry offering… You can find are strawberry scented hand crafted candles, strawberry themed hand sewn items, clothing, and even doll clothes. There’s pottery, jewelry, and more all with strawberries in mind. A full list of vendors including those with strawberry offerings will be made available at the purple info booth at Skypoint during the event itself.
Visit downtownbillings.com for vendor information & applications. NO DOGS ALLOWED PLEASE.
