Taste of Alpharetta People's Choice Awards: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Taste of Alpharetta People's Choice Awards is

The Taste of Alpharetta People's Choice Awards is the public-vote piece of the Taste of Alpharetta festival, an annual food festival held in Alpharetta, Georgia. The organizer behind the event is the City of Alpharetta, which runs the festival as a special event and lists a special events contact on the alpharetta.ga.us domain. The festival brands itself as a long-running Alpharetta tradition, and a third-party profile traces its founding to 1991, calling it the longest-running food festival in Metro Atlanta.

The vote itself is hosted on the festival's own domain at tasteofalpharettaga.com, not on an outside balloting service. The ballot lives on the festival's entertainment page, the same page that carries the Culinary Competition, The Taste Lab, live music and the Kidz Zone lineup. The Culinary Competition is presented by Kroger Delivery and decided by a blind tasting during the event, while the People's Choice side is the part open to a public vote.

The vertical here is a best-of award for food and beverage vendors: the page prints Best-of phrases such as Best Appetizer, Best Entree and Best Dessert around the competition results, and the festival's own promotion notes categories including Best Street Food and Best Vegetarian. Those phrases name candidates and results as printed, not a confirmed full ballot roster.

The dated record for the People's Choice vote

Two editions of the award show up on the festival's own pages, in 2025 and 2026. The 2026 entertainment page is the live ballot for this cycle, and it sits alongside tiles exploring the winners of the 2026 Taste of Alpharetta Culinary Competition presented by Kroger Delivery. The festival describes itself as an annual food festival, and the award travels with the festival rather than running as a standalone online contest.

The dated anchor for the 2026 cycle is festival day itself. The festival runs Thursday, May 14, 2026, from 5-10 PM in downtown Alpharetta, and the People's Choice vote runs on that same day from 5 pm to midnight. That gives the vote a window that starts with the event and stretches two hours past the festival's own 10 PM close, so the final stretch of balloting happens after the grounds have emptied.

One adjacent date matters for vendors rather than voters: vendor applications to join The Taste Lab are open until April 1. That is an entry deadline for businesses wanting a spot at the festival, not a voting date, but it marks when the field of voteable vendors is effectively set for the May event.

What the organizer has not published is the fine print of the vote itself: the entertainment page carries no per-person limit, no daily-return rule and no eligibility text, so those details should be confirmed on the live ballot each cycle. The same goes for the exact category roster the 2026 form carries, since the page prints only Best-of phrases around the competition results rather than a complete list.

How a supporter votes at the festival

The mechanic is deliberately on-site. Signs located throughout the event carry a QR code that links to the online voting form, so the intended voter is a festival attendee standing near the vendor they want to reward. Scanning the code opens the online voting form directly, with no separate search for a ballot page. The form lives on the festival's own domain, which keeps the whole loop, sign to scan to ballot, inside the organizer's own site.

Timing is the second half of the mechanic. The vote runs on festival day, May 14, 2026, from 5 pm to midnight. A supporter who arrives when the gates open at 5 PM can vote immediately, and a supporter who stays through the live music and the Kidz Zone hours still has until midnight to submit, two hours after the festival itself closes at 10 PM.

The form itself is described only as an online voting form. The festival's page does not state whether it asks for an email, a name or any verification, and it does not state how many times one person may submit. Those details are enforced, if at all, on the form during the festival-night window rather than published in advance.

Results follow after the fact: winners are announced on Taste of Alpharetta social media after the event. That is the only results channel the page names, so a vendor's supporters should expect the outcome on the festival's social accounts rather than on the ballot page itself, which by then also carries the Culinary Competition winners' tiles from the Kroger Delivery-presented blind tasting.

How this ballot sits among Georgia best-of votes

Georgia runs a busy best-of calendar, and the Taste of Alpharetta People's Choice Awards occupies a distinct corner of it. Most of the state's reader-vote programs are media-published contests that run for weeks online: Best of Atlanta from Atlanta magazine, Best of Cobb from Cobb Life Magazine, Best of Forsyth from Forsyth County News, Best of Augusta from Augusta Magazine, Best of Middle Georgia, and the Athens Community's Choice Awards. Every one of those programs has its own publisher and its own nomination and voting rounds.

The Alpharetta award is different in three ways. First, the host is the event itself, not a publication: the City of Alpharetta runs the festival, and the ballot sits on the festival's own domain. Second, the window is compressed into a single day, the 5 pm to midnight stretch on May 14, 2026, where the media contests typically stay open far longer. Third, the entry point is physical, a QR code on signs throughout the festival grounds, which ties the vote to foot traffic in a way no online-only ballot does.

For a vendor, that shape changes the strategy. A restaurant competing in Best of Forsyth or the Athens Community's Choice Awards can campaign to an online audience across a long window, while a Taste of Alpharetta People's Choice push has to concentrate on the crowd that is actually downtown on festival day. Both models reward organized supporter outreach, but the Alpharetta version rewards on-site conversion most of all, because the QR code puts the ballot in front of every attendee walking past a sign.

Strengthening support in a one-night festival vote

Because the People's Choice window is a single evening, preparation matters more than it does in a month-long ballot. A vendor with a festival presence can treat the 5 pm to midnight window as a campaign night: staff who mention the vote at the counter, signage at the booth pointing to the same QR code the festival posts on its own signs, and a social post that morning reminding customers the vote opens at 5 pm. The festival's QR-code signs do part of the work already, since every attendee passes one.

The organizer publishes no statement on outside help, vote software or purchased support for this form, and no per-person limit appears on the entertainment page either. That silence cuts both ways: nothing published forbids a coordinated push, and nothing published protects one, so the safe read is that the form's own behavior on festival night is the only enforcement anyone can count on. Vendors weighing paid support against the organizer's unstated position can compare options on our award-votes page, but the organizer's rules come first wherever they are printed.

What is fully in a vendor's control is turnout. The Taste Lab application deadline of April 1 sets the vendor field, and everything after that is about getting supporters downtown on May 14 and getting them to scan before midnight. A one-night vote rewards reminders sent that afternoon far more than campaigns built for longer contests.