Courtesy / Maine Whoopie Pie Festival
Local bakers sell a wide variety of whoopie pies at the 2018 festival in Dover-Foxcroft.
June 22, 2022
A lot to whoop about: Maine Whoopie Pie Festival returns in Dover-Foxcroft
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The 2018 Maine Whoopie Pie Festival brought thousands of visitors to Dover-Foxcroft.
By Bridget Reed Morawski
After two years of pandemic-related obstacles, the organizer of the Maine Whoopie Pie Festival is looking forward to bringing some sweetness — and out-of-town dollars — back to Dover-Foxcroft.
The celebration returns to the Piscataquis County town on Saturday, and will include roughly 20 bakers, from Houlton to Worcester, Mass., selling their fluffy pastries to thousands of visitors.
Around 100 artists, vendors and crafters will also display their goods for sale, said Patrick Myers, the festival organizer and executive director of Dover-Foxcroft’s Center Theatre for the Performing Arts.
Additional planned activities, like a live music stage and a whoopie pie eating contest, will return, albeit with some pandemic precautions.
“We are still having our whoopie pie eating contests,” Myers told Mainebiz. “But we're gonna give those contestants a little more room so people aren't, you know, chomping down on whoopie pies sitting right next to each other.”
The Maine Whoopie Pie Festival typically attracts thousands of visitors to Dover-Foxcroft, and is a major source of retail sales as well as future tourism and business. But the emergence of the ongoing pandemic forced Myers to take the festival online in 2020.
Plans to try an in-person festival in 2021 were dashed after local medical officials warned organizers of increased community spread, causing them to cancel the normally annual event.
While several other local festivals and events draw in hundreds or even thousands of visitors in a typical year, “for some reason, there’s something about whoopie pies that brings in three or four times that [of those other festivals], brings in just thousands of people,” said Denise Buzzelli, the Piscataquis Chamber of Commerce executive director, said in an interview.
In 2019, she recalled, around 8,000 visitors came to town, spending money and discovering new-to-them businesses.
“The festival has been one of the busiest, if not the busiest, day of the year [for Dover-Foxcroft businesses],” said Myers. “Pulling the festival for years is like taking Christmas out of a retailer's business model.”
The festival also serves as the main fundraiser for both the Center Theatre and the chamber. “It's very detrimental when we cannot hold the festival, it's a lifeline for us” in Piscataquis County, added Buzzelli. “We absolutely look forward to it every year, not just from the financial perspective, but also the community just absolutely loves it.”
That’s not to say all economic activity has ground to a halt since the pandemic began. Buzzelli said that “droves of people” came from elsewhere in the Northeast to rent a pandemic refuge away from their home cities.
“And from that, I have to say we’ve got people here that have purchased properties because they visited during COVID,” she said. “We have new families here, we have younger children … we can’t keep diapers on the shelves.”
“It’s interesting, because out of something so bad, we had new people come to the state that hadn’t experienced it before,” Buzzelli added.
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