New festival offers opportunity to eat, drink and be merry in New Bedford

Posted Jan 12, 2017 at 2:59 PM
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NEW BEDFORD – A Massachusetts-based event company is bringing a trendy new addition to New Bedford’s slate of summertime festivals.
The city will host a Food Truck and Craft Beer Festival on July 15 at Fort Taber.

The event, announced Thursday, will bring at least 20 food trucks from the surrounding region and more than a dozen local, regional and national breweries.
“We are delighted they chose us as one of their locations,” said Dagny Ashley, the city’s Director of Tourism and Marketing. “We were looking for new ways to attract new visitors and new demographics to New Bedford and we thought this would be a good way to doing that.”
Ashley reached out in the fall to Anne-Marie Aigner, president of Allston-based Aigner/Prensky Marketing Group and executive producer of Food Truck Festivals of America, about bringing a festival to the city.
“I’ll be honest with you, I’ve lived in Massachusetts for 35 years and I don’t know if I’ve ever been in New Bedford,” Aigner said. “But when I drove around with Dagny …; I was totally blown away.”
The festival, Aigner said, could help spread the word about all New Bedford has to offer.
“We’re using a trendy event …; to draw young people to the area for a reason other than, ‘Hey, come see New Bedford,'” she said. “Once they get there, I think they’ll have the same reaction I did – ‘Wow, I didn’t know this was here.'”
Ashley said that is precisely the goal.

“Let’s bring them in and show them everything we have to offer in the city,” she said.
The tour began in 2011 in the Pine Hills community in Plymouth. It has since grown to a national concern.
“At the first one in 2011 we had eight trucks. We now have a listing in New England alone of 550 food trucks,” Aigner said.
It has effectively seized upon the rise in food culture and the spike in popularity of craft beers.
“Food trucks and craft beer, it was a marriage made in heaven in our books,” she said.
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