Florida Strawberry Festival 2024 - James Scott

The 89th Florida Strawberry Festival opens Thursday in Plant City. More than 600,000 showed up during the 2023 run and those numbers are expected to be met or exceeded this year. We speak with one of the festival's associate directors, James Scott.

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
Gordon Bird here with Beyond the Newsonce again. It's Strawberry Festival time.
The Florida Strawberry Festival starting Thursday inPlant City and it's running through March the
tenth. James Scott is an associatedirector. He's on the board that runs
the Florida Strawberry Festival. Mister Scott, welcome to Beyond the News. Thank
you, Gordon. It's my pleasureto be here with you today. Well,

(00:20):
now, this is of course theFlorida Strawberry Festival. It starts on
Thursday. It's really the biggest orcertainly one of the biggest events of its
kind in Florida. And let's startby just giving people an idea just how
big this event is and how muchit encompasses. We'll talk about the music,
and that's its whole thing by itselfand really one of the hallmarks at

(00:41):
the festival. But let's just givean idea of how big this event is
and how much it encompasses over thenext ten days or so. Sure,
Yes, it's an a eleven dayevent, and this is going to be
our eighty ninth year here in PlantCity. And last year we set attendance
records with a little over six hundredthousand people, and so with the way

(01:02):
the weather forecast is shaping up forthis year, we anticipate probably being right
back at that six hundred thousand attendeenumber this year. But we have over
eighty five rides in the midway,we have twenty on ground entertainers during the
festival, and there's over four hundredfood concessionaires as well as arts and craft

(01:25):
vendors here. People have a bigit's gonna be a big undertaking for eleven
days. People I've spoken to inthe past, all who are associated with
the festival talk about how big itis and also how small town it feels.
That it keeps that feel of thecountry fair, of the of the
small town fair, and that's somethingyou all really work hard at. Yes,

(01:46):
it's unique, and we think alot of it's attributable to our volunteers.
There's so many volunteers. There's somany moving parts, and a lot
of them are made up with volunteers, volunteers of the festival, volunteers,
maybe from a church group that's runningthe shortcake stand. You know, there's
there's there's so many volunteers for somany different organizations that make the festival go.

(02:07):
It's really in a lot of ways, like a big chunk of Plant
City and its people are are involvedin the event and volunteering for the event.
Well, let's talk about some ofthe music acts. You have free
entertainment and you of course have theheadliners which have their own tickets. In
between those two, you have avery very wide range of acts and styles

(02:29):
of music that are going to beappearing this year. Yes, we have.
This year was our largest budget committedto to our entertainment in our new
Amphitheater seeding area. We have everythingfrom Jimmy Sturr and the Orchestra to the
Beach Boys. They're coming back againthis year. They were big hit last
year. We have flow Rider comingthis year and rock act Foreigner, they've

(02:54):
got a great following. We've gotthe Commodores coming this year. And then
we've got Dade Cities very owned toBellamy Brothers and another country rock act and
zz Top and then mixed in therea number of country music acts in the
way of Jordan Davis, Parker McCollum, Craig Morgan and then Cody Johnson finishes

(03:15):
the festival out a week from Sunday, that's our grand Finale act. Now
the tickets for adults are ten dollars, and I believe it's four dollars for
children. And you have several specialdays and discount days again this year.
Yeah, so at the gate nowthis year, Gordon, it's fifteen dollars.
It's ten if you buy them inadvance at publics. Ten dollars in

(03:35):
advance at publics. But yes,to your point, almost every day we
have if people are willing to checkour website. Every day there's discounts available
for ride passes. For example.This Friday, for example, is Public's
Food and Fun Day, and ifsomeone brings a Public's branded item, nonperishable
item to donate, they get adiscount off the span for the rides,

(04:00):
and then all that food gets donatedto the local food bank. So every
every day there's something like that wheresomeone brings in a receipt or someone brings
in a food item. Uh.Just I encourage everyone before they come out
to check our website or check outour app, and let's go ahead and
give out that uh you know,the app. I'm sure they can find
on on their particular phone service.But let's go ahead and give that website

(04:20):
to dress out for people who'd liketo go there and find out more.
Yeah, so just a little bitabout the app. It's our first year
with this app. We've never haduh well, years ago when apps first
came out, we we tried anapp and this just didn't It just didn't
work out very well. So weactually uh discontinued the app, and then
this year we developed a new oneand it's been, uh, it's been

(04:44):
fantastic. So I encourage people todownload it from the app store. But
our website is just fl Strawberry Festivaldot com fl for Florida Strawberry Festival dot
com. But the app is prettyneat because you can purchase tickets through it,
even concert tickets. You can purchasean eat ticket electronic ticket through it.
You can mark where you park inyour vehicle, so at the end
of the day you can find yourvehicle easily. You can find any food

(05:09):
concessionaire vendor through the app. It'spretty slick, very slick, and very
handy. James Scott, an associatedirector with the Florida Strawberry Festival. Thanks
for joining us, and we appreciateyour time and thank you for talking with
us on beyond the news. Thankyou Gordon, have a great day.