Message from our Founders

Haters Gonna Hate (except when they’re sorta right.)

The organizers of the Arizona Taco Festival would like to take this opportunity, to first-and-foremost, thank everyone that participated in the 2015 Arizona Taco Festival. This includes all attendees, sponsors, restaurants and bars, vendors, and workers.

To say it takes a village to put this event on, is not a metaphor, it literally does.

We plan each year with the hopes of having more guests than the year before, and do our best to meet those needs and expectations. It’s been “so far so good” in the past 5 years of this landmark event.

But this year, it seems that people’s love of tacos and of our event grew to a proportion that not only took us by surprise, but knocked us a little sideways.

Our attendance swelled to almost double what we have had in the past, and in turn, that caused the most obvious and unfortunate result—long lines.

Now we realize that haters are going to say that this was all some Machiavellian master plan from evil event producers trying to rake in all the money they can without regard for the event experience.

Well nothing could be further from the truth.

In fact, if you notice, the majority of complaints came on Saturday when we were all hit by surprise, but notice that the next day, we reacted with solutions that made for a day without the same problems. If you look at Yelp, Twitter, Facebook, any of it, 99% of complaints are related to Saturday.

It should also be noted that we could not even set up more than 75% of the event until Saturday morning due to 40mph winds, freezing rain, and a massive dust storm that shut down set up on Friday at 3pm. Talk about out of our control!

We are a very small company made up of a few people that put their hearts into these events, and nobody is more decimated when things go awry than us. We plan all year and really put ourselves out there. When things go wrong, we are crushed.

Yes people, there were long lines, but that said, this is not a part of bad planning or poor organization. A line is a line and it forms for a multitude of reasons. Do you call the airport and yell at them when you wait to go through security? How about the lines at the grocery store when you’re trying to buy milk, but there is someone in front of you with 27 coupons trying to negotiate with the cashier. Has anyone ever been to DMV or the US Post Office?

YES, LINES STINK!

We think you get our point.

As upset as some were about the long lines, we also hope for a little tolerance when 10,000 extra people show up to your door. Please, refrain from the online insults. We’re not “dickheads,” we don’t “deserve to be killed,” and we’re not “complete amateurs at the event business.”

We did the best we could do on the day, and we remedied it the next day and will plan for it for next year. We can’t tell you how much it hurts when someone says they’ve been to the Taco Fest for 3 years in a row and this year it sucked. Like any reputable business owner, we’re sorry, we fix, and we want you back.