EPCOT's Festival Season

The EPCOT International Food and Wine Festival opened on Aug. 27, its 30th anniversary year, and runs through Nov. 21, 2026, with more than 30 food booths, which Disney calls Global Marketplaces, set up around World Showcase, the park’s ring of country pavilions. The Festival of the Holidays follows, Nov. 27 to Dec. 30. On Sept. 10, Walt Disney World set the first two festivals of 2027, the International Festival of the Arts from Jan. 15 to March 1 and the International Flower and Garden Festival from March 10 to May 31. Lined up on a calendar, those dates put a festival in every month but July. The one long gap runs from early June to late August.

It started small. A spring garden show came first, in 1994. Food and Wine followed in 1996, dreamed up by George Kalogridis, then rising through the ranks at Walt Disney World, to bring crowds in during the slow autumn weeks, and it worked so well that Disney spent the next 30 years filling more of the year. Todd Ruffner-Schoenfeld, the editor of HeadLines Decoded, wrote this seven-part series after spending most of his adult life planning trips around these festivals from homes in Ohio, Kentucky, California and Texas. Now he lives locally and holds an annual pass. He says the park still looks wonderful and the food is still good. Walking all of them in one year, though, he sees the same engine under each: a ring of food booths, called Outdoor Kitchens in spring, Global Marketplaces in fall and Holiday Kitchens in December.

Part 1 lays out how the off-season was filled one festival at a time, and why fans on sites such as Inside the Magic and the Disney Food Blog say they are losing interest. The Disney Food Blog in 2026 ran a piece titled “Why Fans Are Ditching the EPCOT Food and Wine Festival.” Part 2 is the Festival of the Arts, the youngest, launched in 2017. Todd finds it keeps its own shape because it is built around working artists, and the first one he looks for is James Coleman, once a background painter in the Disney studios. Part 3 is Flower and Garden, the original. He dates the change there to 2013, when the Outdoor Kitchens arrived and the gardens slowly became the backdrop for a food walk. Part 4 takes on Food and Wine, which grew far bigger while losing its Festival Center, a home for cooking demonstrations and seminars that opened in 2007, and Party for the Senses, the evening grand tasting last held in 2019.

Part 5 moves to the free concerts each festival stages at the open-air America Gardens Theatre, Eat to the Beat chief among them. Todd writes that the music stayed fresh because each lineup keeps its regulars and adds new names, and he describes what David Archuleta’s shows mean to him and to many in the LGBT+ community. Part 6 is the Festival of the Holidays. Live storytellers stand in front of the pavilions, La Befana in Italy and Père Noël in France among them, sharing real holiday customs. Todd also remembers the multi-stage New Year’s Eve party he saw from the monorail platform as a cast member, a night he says has since shrunk. Part 7 closes on the Candlelight Processional, in which a celebrity narrator reads the Christmas story before a choir and orchestra, a Disneyland tradition from 1958 that moved to EPCOT in 1994. Todd once built a whole December trip around hearing Edward James Olmos read it.

Start with Part 1. It sets out the calendar and the idea the other six parts return to. For a trip already booked this fall, Parts 4 and 5 cover what is running now. And anyone hoping to hear a particular narrator at Candlelight should check the list Disney published on Sept. 8, summed up at the bottom of this page, because it has changed since Part 7 ran.