Overview The Chicago Food Truck Festival is a summer weekend of gourmet food trucks in the South Loop, and part of the reason it exists is city law: Chicago bars trucks from parking within 200 feet of a restaurant, so a permitted festival is one of the few places dozens of trucks can serve at once. The main edition runs in the South Loop, and the festival also stages editions in LaBagh Woods, a Cook County forest preserve on the North Side. On site Gates ran 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. on both days of the 2026 edition, at 2300 S. Indiana Avenue. Trucks, tents and chef-driven stands line the site, with live music through the day, and the largest South Loop editions have carried up to 72 food vendors. The 2026 theme, The Return of the Daisy, brought Daisy margaritas from the Chicago Margarita Festival. Guests are told to bring lawn chairs, and a VIP ticket sits above free general admission. Audience The festival describes its crowd as food-loving locals, families, influencers and press. It plans for them to settle in rather than pass through: lawn chairs and strollers come in, and the site leaves room for lines, music and families sitting on the lawn between trucks. Track record Blackshire launched the first festival in 2014 outside U.S. Cellular Field; turnout outran the operation, and in 2015 it moved to the South Loop, dropped the gate fee and added trucks. From 2015 to 2019 the team ran the official food truck rotation at Wrigley Field for the Cubs, covering all 82 home games and special events on Gallagher Way. It paused for the pandemic, reached its 12th edition in 2025 and estimates about 520,000 guests across all its seasons. Brand presence In 2018 the festival took over Gallagher Way outside Wrigley Field as Budweiser's Taste of Summer, and it has curated trucks for Bud Light's Friendsgiving at Wrigley. Its own weekend sells a title sponsor with naming rights to the whole festival and the main stage, a presenting partner with a 10-by-30 footprint and two banners, and smaller partners with 10-by-20 and 10-by-10 footprints, plus social posts, email inclusion and VIP passes.