EDMONTON — Taste of Edmonton organizers and vendors celebrated the last day of the annual festival with high spirits.

Donovon Vienneau, Taste of Edmonton general manager, said the festival had a strong showing with attendance expected to be higher than in 2019 – the last time the festival was celebrated before pandemic cancellations. The festival saw 250,000 people attend in 2019.

According to Vienneau, the festival will beat those numbers this year after attendance from Sunday is included in the tally.

“Lots of great energy around,” he said. “Seeing smiling, happy, and well-fed Edmontonians coming to Taste of Edmonton was absolutely spectacular.”

Vienneau said this year was one of the driest festivals in recent memory – only six hours of rain happened throughout the event.

“It’s been a lot of years since we’ve had a dry Taste of Edmonton.”

He added that while the festival has been running for 37 years, the COVID-19 pandemic presented new challenges never faced before.

“We endured and got through it,” Vienneau said. “We are happy Edmontonians came out in droves.

“We’ve got a lot of takeaways that we are going to take from this year and still have in 2022 and beyond.”

More than 1,000 volunteers helped bring the event to fruition this year. Vienneau said the event team is already planning for next year’s event.

“We look forward to seeing everybody back on July 21 to 31, 2022.”