20-05-2025
Lansing's Olive Burger Festival canceled for this year
LANSING - Organizers of the Olive Burger Festival have hit pause on the event, canceling this year's celebration.
The event, organized by local group Lansing Foodies and held at Jackson Field, will resume in 2026, said Erin Brains, Lansing Foodies' president and event coordinator.
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"We want to continue to throw an amazing burger party, but need some more time to pull it all together - so we will skip this year and throw the next Olive Burger Festival to 2026," organizers wrote in a May 19 post to Lansing Foodies' Facebook page.
Brains said several factors played into the decision to cancel what would have been the third-annual event, initially planned for September.
An estimated 1,800 people attended the second-annual Olive Burger Festival, held last October, she said. The crowd was smaller than the first year's estimated 2,500 people.
Organizers lost about $5,000 on the event, Brains said. Several other events were being held the same weekend including a Detroit Tigers' playoff game, she said.
"There are a lot of factors that went into our decision, but ultimately it came down to wanting to make sure that our beloved Olive Burger was given the proper celebration it deserves," organizers wrote on the Facebook post.
Brains said a family obligation will require her to travel out of the area during the month of August "and I didn't want to rely on doing all the planning from afar."
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Lansing Foodies, a local group that's amassed more than 81,000 members on Facebook, is not a nonprofit organization but organizers plan to pursue becoming one in hopes that it will help the group secure more sponsorships and grants for the festival, she said.
Pausing the event for a year will help organizers ensure that it can grow when it resumes next year, Brains said.
"When we started planning the Olive Burger Festival, we did it in mind that each year we would make it bigger and better," she said. "We don't want do something that isn't going to be up to the standards of what our vision is with it, which is an increasingly larger celebration of Lansing area food and hopefully an attraction that brings foodies into our region."
Contact Reporter Rachel Greco at rgreco@ Follow her on X @GrecoatLSJ.
This article originally appeared on Lansing State Journal: Lansing's Olive Burger Festival canceled for this year
