Ohio Sauerkraut Festival – Waynesville, Ohio

The Ohio Sauerkraut Festival in downtown Waynesville hosts one of the best craft shows in the nation with a focus on interesting sauerkraut dishes for the curious foodie.

2023 DATE: October 14-15, 2023
Location: Main Street
Waynesville, OH 45068
Website: https://sauerkrautfestival.waynesvilleohio.com/

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This post documents my experience on October 9, 2011.

When I was planning to go to the 42nd Ohio Sauerkraut Festival in Waynesville, I had decided to get there early because I had read about the other 350,000+ festival goers attending with me.

Fortunately for me, I had met 2 of those festival goers the night before and they explained some festival tricks, including where to find the $5 parking lot and the $1 bottled water (most bottles went for $2.50). And, although I was disappointed that the wife didn’t like “that sauerkraut stuff,” I was intrigued on how her voice lifted each time she described her shopping experiences there.

The following morning at 9 am, I arrived via Route 42 N and instinctively went into the left lane toward downtown Waynesville.

But as I waited for the light to change, I realized that the cheaper parking the couple told me about was to my right.

No problem, I thought. I’ll just take the left turn and turn around.

But it wasn’t that easy.

Without another intersection for 1.3 miles, I was fortunate enough to find a partial drive to turn around in and start back east toward the cheap parking.

Unfortunately, when I got to the parking lot, another No Left Turn sign blocked me from entering and I had to continue on and turn around a second time.

The only reason I even bring this up is that this snafu occurred when there was a minimum of people.

I can only imagine it during full traffic (so get there early!).

As I walked onto the festival grounds…

…I was initially overwhelmed by the 450+ booths lined up before me.

Being that I’m a foodie, I immediately checked the festival program to find where all the sauerkraut food booths were located and I was surprised to see that it wasn’t indicated on the map where I could find them (like the Circleville Pumpkin Show).

So rather than read through the listed food vendors and then reference their numbers back to the map, I decided to find them on my own…

…passing hippie clothing…

…antique furniture…

…and cooking demonstration booths…

…before eventually seeing my first sauerkraut food booth.

Instead of being clustered together, sauerkraut booths were dispersed among the multitude of vendor booths. And, being that I was there early, the reasoning may not have been so obvious.

But, later that day…

…the sauerkraut donut booth, for example, would have an hour-long wait.

So imagine a few lines like that in close proximity of each other!

The festival would be crowded enough.

Another reason they may have been spread out was that there weren’t all that many sauerkraut booths considering the size of the festival.

I say this because there were 450+ booths at the festival. 33 of these booths booths were food and/or beverage. And, of these 33 food/beverage booths, only 12 definitely had sauerkraut among menu ingredients.

This made me realize that the true draw, in the end…