People’s Choice Award: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the People’s Choice Award is and who runs it

The People’s Choice Award is the public-voting strand of the Arkansas Food Hall of Fame, a program the Division of Arkansas Heritage describes as the place to honor Arkansas's unique foods, legendary restaurants, remarkable cooks, and influential food entrepreneurs, as well as culturally significant festivals and events. The Arkansas State Archives administers the program, and the ballot is hosted at arkansasheritage.com, a domain the agency runs itself, with no outside contest platform involved.

That hosting choice shapes the whole supporter experience. Because the Food Hall of Fame pages sit inside the arkansasheritage.com family alongside the Arkansas State Archives' other resources, the People's Choice Vote is not a widget embedded in a newspaper's readers-choice system. The mission page carries the program's own navigation, including Food Hall of Fame, Events, About Us, Staff, Blog, Contact and a public notice link, plus a phone line, 501-324-9150, and an email contact for questions.

The program's footprint is statewide. A reception address printed on the site, 141 Cherry Street in Helena, Arkansas, anchors one of its in-person events, but the vote itself is open to supporters across Arkansas rather than to a single city's readers. As a category of program this is a best-of contest in the broadest sense: instead of ranking businesses in one market, the ballot celebrates food culture across the whole state. The table below gathers what is confirmed about the program.

The dated timeline for the People’s Choice Award

The Food Hall of Fame has a documented starting point. The Division of Arkansas Heritage launched the program in 2016, and the past-winners page on arkansasheritage.com marks 2017 as the first year of the Food Hall of Fame. The site also carries a 10th Anniversary marker for the program, which places the People's Choice strand inside a food-heritage project that has been running for a decade.

For the People's Choice Award itself, editions ran in 2025 and in 2026. The 2025 window is the one with printed dates: the People's Choice Vote was open until August 6th, 2025, and the nomination call for Arkansas restaurants, food events and culinary icons ran through September 30. Those two dates are the only day-level facts the arkansasheritage.com pages print for the cycle.

Several facts sit outside that printed timeline. The Arkansas State Archives publishes no day-level opening date for the People's Choice Vote and no roster of the ballot's food categories; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The pages also print no per-supporter vote limit for the strand, and no separate round dates for the nomination and voting phases appear anywhere on the mission page. A supporter planning around the 2026 edition therefore has the annual pattern and the 2025 dates as a guide, and the live ballot as the final word on whatever the current cycle decides.

How a supporter votes in the People’s Choice Award today

Casting a vote in this strand is a straightforward public ballot, and it happens on the agency's own pages. A supporter opens the Arkansas Food Hall of Fame mission page at arkansasheritage.com, where the People's Choice Vote banner appears during the live window, follows the vote link, reviews the nominees posted for the current cycle and sends in a selection from the Food Hall of Fame page itself. No purchase and no nomination of your own is required to take part in the People's Choice strand.

Two things follow from that setup. First, because the ballot is hosted on arkansasheritage.com with no outside contest platform involved, there is no third-party login screen standing in front of the vote; the mission page prints no requirement for an account, and nothing on the Food Hall of Fame navigation suggests one. Second, the window matters more than the method. The 2025 vote closed on August 6th, 2025, and a vote submitted after a cycle's closing date has nowhere to land, so checking the live page before planning a push is the first step.

The nomination side runs on the same site. The call to nominate favorite Arkansas restaurants, food events and culinary icons ran through September 30 in the 2025 cycle, which means a supporter who wants a business on next year's ballot has a nomination window to work with before any voting starts. Both phases live on the arkansasheritage.com Food Hall of Fame pages, so one bookmark covers the whole cycle.

How this ballot sits beside its Arkansas neighbours

Arkansas has no shortage of public-vote programs, and the People's Choice Award stands apart from all of them in both subject and host. The Arkansas Times Best of Arkansas is an alt-weekly readers-choice ballot covering the whole state, while the Arkansas Business Best of Biz ranks the state's business community for a trade readership. Both are media-published contests; the People's Choice Award is a state heritage program voting on food.

The city-level siblings narrow further. CommunityVotes Jonesboro runs a nominate-then-vote cycle for one city, the Best of the Grand Prairie serves Stuttgart readers through the Stuttgart Daily Leader, and the Best of the Best from the Russellville Courier does the same for Russellville. The Arkansas Money & Politics Best of AMP adds a politics-and-business angle. None of these votes on restaurants, cooks and food festivals as a heritage subject, and none is hosted by a state archives.

The practical difference for anyone voting comes down to reach. A Jonesboro or Stuttgart ballot rewards mobilizing a single town's customer base, while the People's Choice Award asks a nominee to draw from Arkansas food fans wherever they are, on a ballot that celebrates the state's culinary identity rather than its businesses alone. A nominee weighing where to invest effort can treat the two kinds of ballots as separate campaigns with separate audiences.

Strengthening support for an Arkansas Food Hall of Fame nominee

Because the People's Choice Award is a public vote on the agency's own arkansasheritage.com pages, support is built the way any statewide food ballot is built: by pointing Arkansas food fans at the Food Hall of Fame ballot while the window is open. A restaurant or food festival nominee can use its own social accounts, email list and in-store signage to send supporters to the vote link, and the statewide scope means those supporters do not have to live in one town to count.

No rule on outside help appears on the Food Hall of Fame pages, so a nominee should keep its push within what the live page allows rather than assuming a limit or a loophole. General tactics that transfer to public ballots of this kind, from timing a push to mobilizing existing customers, are laid out in how to get more votes online, and the award-ballot specifics are in buy award votes. What no page can promise is an outcome: the Food Hall of Fame's winners are decided by whatever the live ballot shows.