Organizer says it's 'heartbreaking' to bid the festival goodbye

After 25 years celebrating one of the world's great flavours, organizers of the Canadian Garlic Festival are hanging up their garlic presses.

The event celebrated its 25th birthday in 2016.

Sandra Sharko, one of the garlic festival's organizers, said one of the factors going into its cancellation is the fact volunteers are dwindling in number and getting older.

She said it takes a massive amount of volunteer work to make the hand-made Ukrainian foods that were sold at the festival, a fundraiser for the Ukrainian Seniors' Centre.

Sharko also said a new festival, Sudbury Poutine Fest, running the same weekend, Aug. 25-27, further complicates things.

“It [would be] difficult to compete with them,” Sharko said.

Instead of the full-scale festival people are familiar with, there will be a small booth selling perogies and cabbage rolls outside of the Ukrainian Seniors Centre on Aug. 27.

Paul Fairley, president of Admiral Live, which is putting on Sudbury Poutine Fest, said before putting on a festival, he always checks with local stakeholders, including the tourism department, to see what's going on the same weekend.

He said he wasn't made aware of the garlic festival before booking the poutine festival.

“The last thing I want to do is produce an event that I have competition on,” Barrie-based Fairley said.

For the past few years, his company has run New Music Fest at the Grace Hartman Amphitheatre in Sudbury, and will again this year in September.

It's also moving into food festivals. Besides the Sudbury Poutine Fest, Admiral Live is putting on Feast Fest Sudbury in Bell Park June 23-25.

“Sudbury's been a really good market for us,” Fairley said.

After being made aware of the situation, Fairley said he reached out to the garlic festival organizers to see if they could come to a mutually beneficial solution. Unfortunately, he said, they couldn't.

It's “just heartbreaking” to cancel the festival after 25 years, Sharko said, “but that's the way it went.”

So, at the end of August, raise a clove, Greater Sudbury, and toast the Canadian Garlic Festival for celebrating the most widely used food-flavouring agent in world history.