You can smell it before you see it. That is the first thing every veteran of the Cleveland Garlic Festival will tell you, and it is the reason Food & Wine magazine once crowned the event “America’s Stinkiest Festival.” For two late-summer days, historic Shaker Square fills with the unmistakable perfume of the “stinking rose” — roasted, toasted, fried, mashed into ice cream and even brewed into beer — as thousands of people gather for what has become Northeast Ohio’s most pungent and joyful food tradition. On Saturday, August 29, and Sunday, August 30, 2026, the festival returns, and it brings with it a mission that runs far deeper than garlic fries.
The festival is the largest annual fundraiser for North Union Farmers Market, the nonprofit that has anchored Cleveland’s local-food movement for three decades. Every dollar raised over the weekend helps fund food-access programs — SNAP matching, Produce Perks, WIC and Senior Farmers Market Nutrition Program vouchers — at the organization’s network of farmers markets across the region. Organizers describe the festival as a joyful mash-up of food, community and fun with a serious mission at its heart.
The roots of that community run deep, and they begin with a biologist-turned-chef named Donita Anderson. In 1995, Anderson founded North Union Farmers Market, naming it in honor of the North Union Shakers, the religious and agricultural community that first settled the Shaker Heights area. Its first Saturday market at Shaker Square launched that July with just six skeptical farmers who turned up — and sold out within the hour to 500 eager shoppers. Over the following decades, North Union grew into a beloved institution, and it was Anderson who noticed something interesting on her growers’ tables: unusual garlic varieties, like Romanian red, were quietly appearing alongside the standard grocery-store bulbs. More than 50 types of garlic were being grown in Ohio fields, and she wanted to keep that trend going. When she learned of the 19th-century French tradition of garlic festivals, she recognized an opportunity. The Cleveland Garlic Festival was born in September 2010 with a practical purpose at its heart: supporting the market and growing farms through garlic production.
Over the years, the festival has developed its own signature traditions, including a Miss Garlic pageant and the Top Chef Garlic Grill-Off, where local chefs are challenged to wield garlic in new and inventive ways. Local bands keep the main stage alive throughout the weekend, and vendors dish up garlic-infused creations.
For the adventurous eater, the festival is a carnival of extremes. Garlic fries are a perennial favorite, joined over the years by garlic ice cream and garlic beer — Anderson described the beer as “a lighter pilsner, but you can feel the garlic on your tongue.” Home cooks can browse a dizzying array of local garlic growers offering varieties for cooking.
Set against this scene is the setting itself. Historic Shaker Square, where North Union launched its very first Saturday farmers market in July 1995, hosts the festival each year.
Nearly two decades in, the festival remains, above all, a fundraiser with flavor — a point organizers are careful never to let the fun obscure. North Union has grown into a network of ten markets that supports more than 90 farmers and 100 local artisans each year. When it opens again on August 29, it will do what it has always done: celebrate a humble bulb that, as one Ohio garlic grower once put it, is an acquired taste — and make a city a little more connected in the process. Tickets are available through the festival website. Whether you come for the garlic ice cream or the grill-offs, the festival asks only that you come hungry, brave and ready to smell it long before you see it.