What's New at EPCOT's 30th Food & Wine Festival?

The biggest eating event on the Walt Disney World calendar just got its start date: the EPCOT International Food & Wine Festival opens August 27, 2026, and runs through November 21 — its 30th anniversary year. Disney laid out the details in its official Food & Wine Festival Foodie Guide on the Disney Parks Blog, published August 19, 2026. This post is based on that single announcement.

If you only remember one thing: the festival is an 87-day marathon of Global Marketplace booths circling World Showcase and beyond, and this year Disney says 30 items have been reimagined from past festivals alongside a fresh batch of debuts. For a park many guests visit specifically to graze their way around the lagoon, a 30th-anniversary edition with this much turnover is a genuine reason to plan a trip.

What Disney confirmed for the 30th festival

Per the Disney Parks Blog, here’s the verified scope for 2026:

Dates: August 27 through November 21, 2026 — the festival’s 30th year.
30 reimagined items carried over and refreshed from previous festival years.
A slate of new dishes debuting across the marketplaces (details below).
The return of Emile’s Fromage Montage, the festival’s cheese-focused food stroll.
A new CommuniCore Hall offering, “The Wedge,” hosted by Dairy Does More, running September 18 through November 8.
Disney Gift Card wristlets available at the festival, with a $15 minimum activation.

The Foodie Guide lays out the marketplaces and their menu items, but it does not publish per-item prices yet — that’s the one detail still missing at this early stage. Everything below comes straight from that single official guide; we haven’t added outside details.

The new dishes worth circling

We’ve walked this festival’s marketplace lap more times than we can count, and the fastest way to judge a year is the debut menu. Disney called out a handful of new items by name in the announcement:

New item	Where to find it	Why it caught our eye
Basil Pesto Chicken Dumplings	Gyozas of the Galaxy	A savory twist on the festival’s dumpling staple
Smoked Brisket and Cheddar Melt	Hops & Barley	The Americana booth leaning into comfort food
Cannoli Milk Shake	The Wedge (CommuniCore Hall)	A dessert-forward pour tied to the new cheese offering

Three named debuts is a small sample of what will ultimately be dozens of booths, but the mix tells you where this year’s kitchen is pointed: familiar formats (dumplings, melts, shakes) executed with a slightly more indulgent hand. Combine those with the 30 reimagined items, and a returning visitor should expect a noticeably different passport than last year’s.

Cheese gets its own corner again

The announcement confirmed that Emile’s Fromage Montage is back — the festival’s cheese stroll that works like a passport hunt. According to Disney, you collect credit for qualifying cheese dishes as you eat your way around the marketplaces, and completing five cheese items earns you a festival treat redeemable at Shimmering Sips. It’s the kind of built-in mini-quest that turns an aimless grazing lap into a goal, and it pairs neatly with “The Wedge” in CommuniCore Hall (September 18–November 8), where the Cannoli Milk Shake lives.

We’ve long thought the cheese stroll is one of the most underrated ways to structure a festival day — it gives a group a reason to keep moving, and the payoff at the end is a small but real motivator. (We’ve covered the new CommuniCore cheese exhibit that anchors this in a separate post, linked below.)

Our take: a 30th year built for repeat visitors

Here’s our read on why the details matter. An 87-day run means the festival now blankets nearly a third of the calendar, overlapping late summer, all of fall, and the run-up to the holidays. That length is a planning tool: crowds and weather shift dramatically between an August opening week and a mid-November afternoon, so when you go changes the experience as much as what you order.

The 30 reimagined items figure is the number we’d watch most closely. Disney leaning on refreshed classics rather than an all-new menu suggests the festival is optimizing for its most loyal guests — the annual passholders and repeat visitors who can tell you exactly how last year’s dish tasted. For a 30th-anniversary edition, tuning the greatest hits rather than reinventing them is a defensible bet, and one we suspect will play well with the crowd that treats this festival as a yearly tradition.

One practical note from the announcement: the $15 minimum Disney Gift Card wristlets are a small convenience worth knowing about if you’d rather tap a wristband than dig out a card at every booth over an 87-day festival’s worth of small plates.

When to go

With the festival opening August 27 and running to November 21, the calendar splits roughly into a hot, lighter-crowd opening stretch and a cooler, busier fall peak. If beating heat matters more than seeing every booth on day one, note that mid-run additions like The Wedge don’t arrive until September 18 — so an early-September-or-later trip catches more of the lineup at once.

For the complete official wording, dates, and the items Disney has confirmed so far, see the EPCOT International Food & Wine Festival Foodie Guide on the Disney Parks Blog.