Local artisans, tasty samples and food science fill Utah Food Festival this weekend

Local food and beverage makers, including Caffe Ibis, Caputo's and Mountain Born Creamery, will offer samples, sell artisan goods and lead workshops at the Utah Food Festival on May 16 and 17 at the Natural History Museum of Utah. Photo: Natural History Museum of Utah

The two-day event at the Natural History Museum of Utah runs Saturday and Sunday, with workshops, vendor sampling and presentations on the region's food history.

SALT LAKE CITY, Utah — The Utah Food Festival returns to the Natural History Museum of Utah on Saturday, May 16, and Sunday, May 17, with a marketplace of local food and beverage makers, hands-on workshops, and pop-up conversations with museum researchers. The festival runs from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. both days and is included with museum admission, which is free for members.

The lineup leans into Utah’s small-batch food scene. Caffe Ibis, Caputo’s, Mountain Born Creamery, JulieAnn Caramels, The Salted Roots, Tea Grotto, and The Farmhouse at Saccos are among the vendors offering samples and selling artisan goods on the museum floor. Workshops, taught by the makers themselves, cover practical skills: foraging and cooking wild plants along the Wasatch Front, making butter from Utah cream, blending custom salts, brewing loose-leaf tea, and making caramel apples.

What sets the festival apart from a standard food fair is the museum’s involvement. NHMU researchers will be stationed in the galleries from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. each day to share what they know about food in the region — from ancestral foodways to contemporary production. Staff from the museum’s Range Creek Field Station, in the Book Cliffs of eastern Utah, will run a survival game built around behavioral ecology, the framework the archaeology department uses to study how ancestral peoples made decisions about what to eat.

Players try to reach what station director Shannon Arnold Boomgarden calls “caloric success” — weighing effort against return the way the people who once lived at Range Creek would have.

The festival traces its roots to a 2014 NHMU exhibition on chocolate, which featured workshops with Matt Caputo and a panel of Utah chocolatiers. The pairing of tasting and learning stuck, and the festival is now in its third year.

Workshops carry an additional fee, fill quickly, and include festival admission plus entry to the museum’s “Bug World” exhibition. Museum members receive 50 percent off. The Natural History Museum of Utah is at 301 Wakara Way in Salt Lake City. Tickets and the full workshop schedule are at nhmu.utah.edu.