When Mike McCloud first developed the idea for the World Food Championships in 2011, he focused on creating an event that would be a culminating activity that brought together the winners of various food competitions from around the world. “There are all sorts of bacon bashes and sandwich slams and chili fests taking place—they’re what we call ‘food sport’ events. And we felt like there needed to be a ‘Super Bowl’ that brought all of this together,” said McCloud, who is president and C.E.O. of the event. Participants earn an invitation to the championships by winning a local, regional, online, or international competition in one of nine categories. The competitions among those invited participants were the event’s primary focus for its first three years, 2012 through 2014, when it took place in Las Vegas. Now in its fourth year, the event has moved to Celebration, Florida, near Orlando and expanded its strategy to include educating and entertaining spectators.
“We spent three years perfecting the culinary tournament, making sure our processes for competing, cooking, judging, and defining a winner were solid. Now we want to turn our food competition into a food festival as well,” McCloud said.
To do that, organizers created several new elements to appeal to spectators. In the Tasting Village, guests could try free samples from more than a dozen vendors. For $25, they could also enter the World Cocktail Experience, sponsored by Brown-Forman, where bartenders offered mixology tips and cocktail samples. To give spectators more insight into the competitive judging process, organizers hosted the “Food Sports Central Desk” each afternoon on the main stage. “We’re playing on the sports theme, so it looks like [ESPN’S] SportsCenter. People can listen for about 30 minutes as I or one of my other V.I.P.s talk about the biggest development from the tournament that day,” McCloud said.
The 2015 championships, which wrap up a weeklong run today, included more than 1,200 competitors from 40 states and 18 countries. As many as 50 participants—from home cooks to executive chefs and restaurant owners—competed in nine categories such as seafood, burger, or dessert to win a part of $350,000 in cash and prizes. The top prize, “Best in Show,” is $100,000 cash. Most of the cooking took place in the tented Kenmore Kitchen Arena, which included 50 competition kitchens outfitted with Kenmore appliances and Bull Outdoor Grills stoves, cooktops, and countertops. The barbecue competition, which McCloud said required a large amount of space, took place at the nearby Westgate Town Center Resort & Spa.
McCloud said he expects attendance to reach about 50,000 spectators and that he intends to return to Celebration in 2016. “We’ve had to learn a new landscape, we’ve had to learn to work with new vendors, and we’d hate to be doing that for one year and then going to someplace else next year,” he said.
