Making the midway, nibble by nibble: Breaking into O.C. Fair’s food alleys takes persistence
Even proven classics like homestyle chocolate chip cookies — not deep-fried, not drizzled with nacho cheese sauce, not even wrapped in bacon — aren’t guaranteed a place at the Orange County Fair, one of the area’s highest-profile family events and grub crawls.
Food vendors have to get past fairgrounds staff members who act as literal arbiters of taste for the fair’s limited booth spaces. Thus, proposed purveyors must combine novelty, quality, persistence and luck to get one of the roughly 100 stands that serve the million-plus people who attend the fair’s month-long run in Costa Mesa.
“It’s not like you can go, ‘We want to be in it’ and you’re in,” said Cathy Johnson, the eponymous cookiesmith of Cathy’s Cookies, who slings chocolate chip cookies from a cheery pink trailer near the Pacific Amphitheatre.
Johnson and her partner, Ross Alger, broke through to the Orange County Fair last year after building a following at the Los Angeles County Fair and Los Angeles Galaxy soccer matches. They called the O.C. Fair offices enough to persuade an executive to stop by their stand at the L.A. County Fair in Pomona.
That kind of field work is a key part of the process, said Michele Richards, vice president of business development for the O.C. Fair.
Fair management challenges vendors to stay interesting and offer “food that’s really going to pop with our customers,” Richards said.
This year, 25 would-be new food vendors applied for stands. Only two made it: Holy Cao’s Boba Tea and Who Fried the Cheese? (curds and cheese sticks). Most other applicants had tent-style set-ups, not the more solid structures required of most fair concessions, Richards said.
Operators of the new stands could not be reached for comment.
Returning food concessionaires must apply every year, but turnover is low.
“No one ever leaves the fair,” Alger said.
The OC Fair & Event Center’s relatively small footprint also makes it tough to get a toehold.
The fairgrounds covers 160 acres, which include livestock and agricultural exhibitions, performance spaces, non-food vendors, carnival rides, games and parking. Within that space this year are 95 concession stands plus 12 carts selling quick essentials such as water or lemonade, Richards said.
L.A. County’s fairgrounds, the Fairplex, covers more than 500 acres. But the two fairs have comparable attendance: Last year, O.C. drew 1.3 million visitors, L.A. County about 1.2 million.
A few years ago, Johnson and Alger, a couple who live in Orange, were at the San Diego County Fair in Del Mar, another million-person-plus megafair, and noticed they couldn’t find a chocolate chip cookie. So they got to work with family and friends to create their own for the fair-going masses.
The two are grocery brokers by day, so they had an inside track on sourcing. Then they had to self-market to fairs and other events.
Cathy’s Cookies set up shop at the L.A. County Fair in 2016 in a rented trailer with only two convection ovens. Johnson and Alger were nervous before their first night there, but visitors followed their noses to the 12-foot-long trailer — no small feat since it was stationed by a camel barn and the “world’s largest steer.” Soon there were wrap-around lines, Johnson said.
Now in a newer four-oven trailer that’s twice as long as the first, the couple and their crew make cookies in batches of 840 every 11 minutes between the stand’s midday opening and late-night closing. The upgraded trailer also has a sharper look to conform to Orange County aesthetic standards, Johnson said.
Cathy’s Cookies only makes chocolate chip — no oatmeal raisin, gluten-free or bite-size.
But simplicity doesn’t have to mean moderation. The cookies are sold in paper cones about a dozen at a time, or in plastic buckets that hold about three dozen.
The limited menu is part branding and part efficiency. In a setting with culinary curiosities such as peanut butter and jelly and Sriracha funnel cake and deep-fried shrimp topped with Fruity Pebbles, Cathy’s Cookies is appealingly, comfortably basic, Johnson said.
“There’s not many people out there that don’t like a good chocolate chip cookie,” she said.
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