2026 People's Choice Best New Food Contest: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the People's Choice Best New Food Contest is and who runs it

The 2026 People's Choice Best New Food Contest is a public-vote food award run by the Iowa State Fair, which describes itself as the largest event in Iowa and one of the oldest and largest agricultural and industrial expositions in the country. The ballot lives on iowastatefair.org, on the results page for the 2026 contest, so no third-party polling service sits between the fairgoer and the count. Among Iowa's public ballots this one is a best-of food award, but instead of ranking plumbers or restaurants across a city, it puts new fair foods head to head and lets visitors decide which one earns the People's Choice title.

Key facts at a glance

Because the organizer hosts the ballot itself, every rule a supporter sees is the fair's own rule, and the results page is where the winning food is posted once the tally closes. The contest sits inside the fair's wider new food program, which the fair's food pages present alongside a Best New Drink award and a Best of Show honor. The audience is whoever the fair draws: an event billing itself as the largest in Iowa pulls visitors from across the state during its August run, and any of them can back a favorite new food while it is on the ballot.

Dates, editions and the published winner history

The contest is annual with a long published history. The fair's food page lists People's Choice winners back to 2013, when the Shrimp Corn Dog from Zag's Po Boys took the title, followed by Funnel Cake on a Stick in 2014, The Rib Shack's Ultimate Bacon Brisket Bomb in 2015, the Iowa Turkey Federation's Not Your Mamma's Taco in 2016, Steer 'N' Stein's Pork Almighty in 2017, and Applishus in 2018. The years on that list run 2013 through 2019, then 2021 through 2026, with no 2020 entry printed.

For 2026, fairgoer votes were tallied August 13 to 19, and the winner was announced on Friday, August 21. There was no nomination phase for the public to vote through: the fair announced eleven finalists and their foods before the tally began. Parm Gnocchi, from Destination Grille, won the 2026 title with 15,954 votes. The 2027 fair is set for August 12 to 22, 2027. The fair's food page states the one-vote-per-person-per-day limit but publishes no eligibility rule for who may cast a ballot; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

How a fairgoer votes in the Best New Food Contest

The mechanic is deliberately simple, and it is built around the fair's own frequency rule. A supporter opens the 2026 contest page on iowastatefair.org, reads through the eleven finalist foods the fair announced before the tally, selects a favorite and submits it. Only one vote per person per day is accepted, so the ballot is designed for fairgoers who return day after day during the August window rather than for a single burst of clicks.

That daily return is the whole game for a vendor with a food on the slate. A stand that reminds each customer to vote, and reminds the ones who loved the dish to come back tomorrow, accumulates votes the same way the 2026 winning total did. The fair's food pages carry the other new food honors beside the contest, including the Best New Drink award and the Best of Show honor, so a supporter following the food ballot will usually see the drink side of the program next to it. The ballot page itself describes no account creation step, and the fair has not printed a rule on how the eleven finalists are chosen for a given year's slate.

How this fair ballot sits beside Iowa's other public votes

Iowa has a busy public-vote scene, and this contest is unlike any of its neighbors. The AHBA Parade of Homes asks the public to judge new homes in Ames. The Cedar Rapids CommunityVotes program and the Best of Cedar Rapids poll run by The Gazette both cover many business categories in the Cedar Rapids market, while the Best of the Corridor from the Corridor Business Journal serves the same corridor from the business side.

In Des Moines, the Best of Des Moines poll from CITYVIEW and the Best of Des Moines from the Business Record rank local businesses across long category lists. This contest is different in three ways: it crowns a single food title rather than a directory of winners, it is decided during the fair itself in August, and it runs on iowastatefair.org itself instead of a third-party polling platform. Its draw is also the fair's draw, a statewide audience of fairgoers, which is why a food total can reach 15,954 votes in a single window.

Strengthening support for a finalist food the right way

Everything about pushing a finalist food here flows from the organizer's published rule: one vote per person per day. A vendor cannot win with one loud push, because the ballot simply will not count repeat submissions from the same person on the same day. What works is turning a fairgoer who tried the dish into a daily voter for the length of the window, through a sign at the stand, a mention at the counter, and a reminder the next morning while the tally is still open.

The fair states its frequency rule plainly on its own food pages, so a campaign built on daily returns from real supporters is the shape the organizer itself expects. Anything that depends on volume the ballot will not accept is wasted effort. For a fuller walkthrough of methods that suit a daily-return ballot, see the guide on getting more votes online, and check the award-specific options on the award votes page before the next window opens.