Walt Disney World’s flagship festival is now underway with the start of the 2024 EPCOT International Food & Wine Festival. Not only is this the year’s biggest event, but it’s the first since 2019 with a wall-less EPCOT thanks to the completion of the overhaul. Given all of that and the completion of CommuniCore Hall and World Celebration, expectations were high for the 2024 foodie fest.
Before we get going, it’s worth noting that this is a review of the 2024 EPCOT International Food & Wine Festival as a whole. It seems like the Global Marketplaces suck up all of the oxygen when it comes to coverage of this event. We believe this is a mistake. We’ll also be updating our food booth reviews and posting new ones over the course of the coming days, but the Global Marketplaces are not the totality of the event. Or at least, they shouldn’t be.
Every single EPCOT festival of the year has food booths. All of the other ones also offer something else. Coverage of those other events also focuses on the other highlights, and for good reason–it can be a lot of fun and compelling! Plenty of Walt Disney World fans and out-of-state Annual Passholders book trips during these festivals just to experience what they have to offer.
Anyway, if you’re only concerned with the Global Marketplaces and don’t care about what else these events normally offer, this review isn’t for you. You should instead wait for the individual food booth reviews and best of list. Spoiler alert: the 2024 EPCOT Food & Wine Festival is actually pretty good when you’re singularly focused on the snacks and drinks!
In fact, the lineup of food booths and menus at the 2024 EPCOT Food & Wine Festival addresses one of our biggest issues with the event in the last few years–that it was skewing too far in the direction of crowd-pleasing, comfort cuisine. I’m a firm believer that you need to meet guests where they are, but at the same time, this is a food festival. The new additions from the last few years would’ve been the equivalent of Cannes Film Festival only screening movies from the Boss Baby franchise.
The Global Marketplaces at the 2024 EPCOT Food & Wine Festival thread the needle much better. Yes, there are still the basic booths with boring menus, but there are also interesting and ambitious ones. (Sadly, given the long lines at the former, it’s understandable why Disney goes this route–giving the people what they want.) In any case, it’s not the cuisine at the event that’s the issue. It’s everything else.
For the 2024 EPCOT International Food & Wine Festival, the iconography, in-park photo ops, decorations, and logos are all pretty much unchanged from last year…which were unchanged from the year before…and year before…and so on. In fact, this exact same visual style has been used every year since the 2020 Taste of EPCOT Food & Wine Festival. Hence these being re-microwaved leftovers instead of microwaved leftovers. (Technically, they’re re-re-remicrowaved leftovers!)
Displays, logos, graphics, etc., all used to change every single year of the EPCOT Food & Wine Festival. The fresh look was something we always appreciated, especially as a contrast to Diet EPCOT. Five years of mostly identical stuff for Walt Disney World’s longest seasonal event feels incredibly tired at this point.
They didn’t exactly nail these visuals so well in 2020 in the first place. It’s not as if the team can’t top what was done back then and is choosing to not mess with perfection. The graphics are fine, but nothing special. Worse yet, there aren’t many of them on display throughout the park.
The 2024 EPCOT Food & Wine Festival was supposed to be the park’s coming out party. For the first time since 2019, the center of EPCOT is finally without construction walls (well, minus the ones around Test Track, but those are different). World Celebration has replaced the Giant EPCOT Dirt Pit, CommuniCore Hall & Plaza are open, and the overhaul is “finished.”
Part of the promise, at least so I thought, about the reimagined central spine of the park is that it could become a canvas for seasonal events. Our World Celebration & CommuniCore at EPCOT Review: Better Than a Dirt Pit & Walls, I Guess? lamented just how boring the World Celebration Gardens and CommuniCore Hall looked.
One bit of solace to that was that bland planters and blank spaces could easily be transformed for festivals. We just had yet to see that because the overhaul wrapped up during the summer, which was “Diet EPCOT” season this year. This made some degree of sense, and certainly explained all the dull and drab spaces throughout World Celebration.
Unfortunately, now the flagship 2024 EPCOT Food & Wine Festival is here and the park doesn’t look all that much different than it did during Diet EPCOT this summer. I’m actually fairly confident that it had more decor back during the 2020 Taste of EPCOT Food & Wine Festival.
There’s no display behind Spaceship Earth, nothing in that weird planter (above is how it looks right now), no Chef Figment topiary (or any topiary, for that matter), and there are no installations whatsoever past the planter right at the front entrance. And that one is exactly the same as it’s been for the last few years. I could literally share a photo from last year and you wouldn’t know the difference.
I’m not expecting Flower & Garden Festival 2.0 here, but it’s wild to me that nothing has been done with any of these planters. Most of them are just simple green spaces, and while they’re better than concrete and 1990s datedness, they’re still bland and begging for more ornamentation and installations. Instead, you could walk from Spaceship Earth to the front of World Showcase without knowing that a festival is even happening.
Then there’s CommuniCore Hall. Oof.
Some fans implored the skeptics to “wait and see” how this flex space would look once a festival rolled around. From our perspective, this was always ludicrous. The interior looks like a hospital cafeteria or convention center flex space or airport terminal, and no amount of dressing it up changes the underwhelming interior design.
But maybe those fans were on to something and CommuniCore would be put to such great use that we’d overlook that? After all, the concept art (above) looked very different and much more ambitious than the finished product that opened in June.
Somehow and against all odds, CommuniCore Hall is worse during the 2024 EPCOT Food & Wine Festival than it was during Diet EPCOT.
As expected, CommuniCore Hall is home to the Macatizers booth, including a sizable overflow queue and seating for this marketplace. That’s fine, I guess. Not ideal, but whatever.
The problem is that the other half of CommuniCore has been taken over as a temporary merchandise location, selling EPCOT Food and Wine Festival items. This very much looks temporary, on par with the makeshift merchandise centers for runDisney events. Nothing here is purpose-built for the location. It looks like racks you’d see at Walmart or Kmart or wherever.
By itself, that’s a bad look. It’s downright pathetic as compared to concept art showing installations and exhibits for festivals. Then again, I think most reasonable fans had long ago given up on such lofty ambitions for this flex space.
What adds insult to injury is the abject greed in thinking there was sufficient space in here for (yet another!) merchandise spot. This space could be all seating for Macatizers, and it still wouldn’t be enough. The tables here are always full, and that would be true even if there were twice as many.
What’s truly amazing to me is that CommuniCore Hall is objectively worse than any festival space used at EPCOT in the last decade. That’s right, the new purpose-built festival venue that took 5 years and untold hundreds of millions of dollars to bring to life, is inferior to past makeshift spaces even from a festival perspective.
All of the things it promised have been squandered. There’s the “state-of-the-art show kitchen” that Disney teased “may even attract a few special culinary guests.” It’s now being used to put the finishing touches on mac & cheese. There’s the “dynamic space to anchor” EPCOT Festivals and event space “limited only by the boundaries of imagination.”
CommuniCore Hall is instead now being used for merchandise racks, as yet another way to juice souvenir sales and try to beat last year’s numbers. If this is what boundless imagination looks like, I’m perfectly fine with the current management leaving Journey Into Imagination alone for now.
From a guest perspective, CommuniCore Hall is not superior to the retrofits done with the Odyssey or Wonders or even the World ShowPlace Pavilion. If anything, I prefer all of those existing venues. The Odyssey has more windows and nice views. The Wonders pavilion is much larger and has a bunch of quirky space that, in the past, was used for fun and random purposes.
World ShowPlace is absolutely massive, and when used in 2020, it had a lot more to offer–multiple booths, tons of seating, areas to decompress, and indoor entertainment. Walt Disney World got creative and put all three to use brilliantly for events.
CommuniCore isn’t creative on any level–the only amazing thing about it is that a venue created specifically for festivals is worse at hosting them than the ones above. Never mind the fact that it’s not really even functioning as a festival center, but rather, a glorified food & merchandise booth.
In terms of other stuff, none of it has returned for the 2024 EPCOT Food & Wine Festival. This includes culinary seminars, demonstrations, meals with celebrity chefs, and other special events. These have been on hiatus since 2019–the last normal year of the event–and we had hoped that they’d return now that CommuniCore Hall is open.
It’s sad to see that none of this is back. As explained in EPCOT’s Food & Wine Festival Is Stale. Here’s What We Want Disney to Change, the event really needs a shot in the arm. This is supposed to be EPCOT’s flagship festival, but has become the weakest event of the year with the least substance.
Instead, the 2024 EPCOT Food & Wine Festival is basically just the Global Marketplaces, Eat to the Beat concerts, a scavenger hunt, and merchandise. Again, though, all of that is present at other events. There’s nothing to distinguish this from any of the other EPCOT festivals. All of the rest have “something else” that makes them distinct draws.
Nevertheless, I’m guessing many of you will not care. That’s perfectly fine! We know plenty of Walt Disney World fans who love EPCOT’s Food & Wine Festival. It’s their favorite event of the year because they enjoy revisiting familiar favorites and have a certain sentimentality about the longest-running festival.
Accordingly, you may want to take my perspective on the 2024 EPCOT International Food & Wine Festival with a grain of salt if you’re a big fan of this event. Especially if you only care about the cuisine and are reasonably satisfied with this year’s menus. (And again, we are! This is probably the best year for food since at least 2021. My biggest complaint on that front is that several of the menus are smaller.)
Food & Wine has been my least favorite of the EPCOT festivals for a while, which is mostly due to everything aside from the food & beverages. For years, I’ve felt this event has been substantively lacking and far too reliant on people spending money on food and alcohol, slowly eliminating the “edutainment” aspects of the festival that make it fun and round out the event.
Still, it boggles my mind that Walt Disney World completely phoned in everything except the Global Marketplaces at the 2024 EPCOT Food & Wine Festival. Again, if you simply don’t care, that’s fine. For many fans, EPCOT’s International Food & Wine Festival is all about the…food & wine.
The thing is, just as I can recognize that not every fan has the same concerns or priorities as me, those who don’t care should be able to appreciate the same. Back when we were out-of-state Annual Passholders living in the Midwest, we could be enticed to book long weekend trips for special events like this.
We did that regularly for EPCOT festivals, Star Wars Weekends, and other themed events. I can say with complete certainty that, but for this blog, I would not be drawn to the 2024 EPCOT Food & Wine Festival. It would be safely skippable. While I won’t pretend that everyone is like us, I know there are a not-insignificant number of out-of-state fans who do think similarly.
By Disney’s own admission, the parks are seeing a slowdown and the company’s forward guidance suggests lower attendance and hotel bookings into 2025. And this is after last summer and fall were already slower than the prior-year. Given that, I’d think that Walt Disney World might want to put the nominal amount of effort into making the 2024 EPCOT Food & Wine Festival a bigger draw.
It’s not like new banners, a Chef Figment topiary, big displays, and other visuals would break the bank. It’s truly baffling how a company that routinely wastes massive amounts of money can also be so cheap and penny-pinching, even in downright counterproductive ways! If Walt Disney World somehow doesn’t have the cash to spend on decorations, maybe they could partner with one of those sponsors they’re always touting and bring back interactive experiences (RIP Cranberry Bog) and other interesting aspects of the event.
To end on a positive note, I will say that it’s nice having the front of the park free from construction walls. Even though a bunch of the lighting effects in the World Celebration Gardens are busted, it’s enjoyable to spend time at the front of the park in the evening. The live music in CommuniCore Plaza adds a great energy. The light shows on Spaceship Earth are excellent, as always. As I’ve said before, the finished product is nicer than a dirt pit.
Overall, what’s still missing from the 2024 EPCOT Food & Wine Festival firmly cements this as our least favorite event of the year at EPCOT, and by a fairly wide margin. Despite that, Food & Wine still generates far more coverage than any of the other events at EPCOT and seems to have more diehard fans. I’m still not totally sure why that is, but Walt Disney World hype built over time usually takes years to undo (for example, Le Cellier remained popular for several years after the Disney Dining Plan eroded its value).
My sincere hope is that someone at Walt Disney World recognizes this before it’s too late, and stops trying to milk Food & Wine to the point that it becomes passe and unpopular. This festival could be so much more, and has been in the past. With EPCOT’s overhaul now finished, there’s absolutely no excuse for the event to continue being a shadow of its former self.
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YOUR THOUGHTS
Are you excited for the 2024 EPCOT International Food & Wine Festival? Disappointed that the look of the event is pretty much identical to the past two years? What do you think of the lineup of Global Marketplaces? Upset that there’s nothing in terms of “edutainment” or anything special to separate this from any of the other EPCOT events? Any questions we can help you answer? Hearing your feedback–even when you disagree with us–is both interesting to us and helpful to other readers, so please share your thoughts below in the comments!
