PoutineFest started with a question I couldn’t shake: how do we celebrate French Canadian culture in a way that feels alive, modern, and exciting? Back in 2014, while working full time, I began volunteering with a local Franco-American nonprofit because I wanted to reconnect with a part of my heritage that I had grown up somewhat distant from.
My grandfather had spoken proudly about our French Canadian roots, and over time I started realizing how much of that culture had quietly faded from everyday life in New England. While researching events across North America, I came across Chicago Poutine Fest and started studying the way food festivals could bring people together around identity, tradition, and fun. I also looked closely at festivals in Quebec and across Canada.
At the time, New Hampshire didn’t really have anything like that. Early on, there were conversations about holding a small event in a church basement, but I kept thinking bigger. I wanted something energetic, public, and community driven. I began reaching out to venues across Manchester, often hearing “no” along the way, until I connected with the New Hampshire Fisher Cats.
Their team helped me understand what it actually took to produce a large scale public event, mostly with dedicated volunteers.
Starting out, I barely even understood social media marketing. There was no formal business, no established brand or logo (my friend Ben made the old logo for free), and “NH PoutineFest” didn’t exist yet beyond an idea I was chasing. I created a simple Facebook page mostly just to experiment and see if people might care.
One day, almost on a whim, I created a Facebook event announcing a future festival at the New Hampshire Fisher Cats. We hadn’t even fully figured out all the details yet. I posted a rough time and date, put my phone down, took my son to get a tubby, and didn’t think much of it.
When I came back, the event had started spreading rapidly across Southern New Hampshire. What began as a simple idea suddenly felt real. People were sharing it, tagging friends, and getting excited about something that didn’t really exist yet except as a vision for celebrating French Canadian culture in a fun, modern way. That post launched it all.
The early years were exhausting and exciting at the same time. Every year brought new lessons about logistics, vendors, crowd flow, sponsorships, equipment, and how to support restaurants that were working incredibly hard during the event.
By 2019, it was clear we had outgrown the original setup. That year, I connected with the team at Anheuser-Busch in Merrimack. Carla and her team believed in the vision immediately, and their support helped elevate the festival into something much larger. Around the same time, my longtime friend Karl from Pitco helped provide fryers that became essential to supporting vendors onsite.
Eventually, relationships with companies like Pineland Farms Dairy Company helped us continue improving the quality and consistency of the festival experience.
When COVID disrupted live events, we adapted by creating a PoutineFest roadshow across multiple locations throughout New England. It was an uncertain time, but the support from restaurants and attendees showed us that the community around the festival was stronger than ever.
In 2021, after live events returned, we shifted the festival to October and introduced the now beloved “Spooktacular” atmosphere. From there, the event continued to evolve, and something else became clear: this community had grown beyond a single state.
We were seeing attendees travel from across New England, many returning year after year with friends, spouses, and eventually their children. That momentum helped inspire the next chapter. In 2024, PoutineFest USA launched Maine PoutineFest at Thompson’s Point. Vermont followed in 2025 at the Pinery, and Boston joined the lineup in 2026 at the beloved Harpoon Brewery. Our New Hampshire event moved to a new home in 2026 at 603 Brewery and evolved to Granite State PoutineFest.
What started as an effort to reconnect with a fading piece of heritage became something much larger: a regional celebration of food, culture, community, and tradition. We’re incredibly proud of how far it has come, and even more grateful to the vendors, attendees, sponsors, volunteers, and partners who helped build it along the way.
