‘For the joy of it’: State Fair diehards say they don’t care about winning a blue ribbon
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Hundreds of eager bakers form a snaking line that runs up and down the streets surrounding the Minnesota State Fair creative activities building. They carry coolers, cake boxes and pie dishes. Some hands are full wheeling wagons or clutching their aluminum-wrapped submissions like newborn babies.
It’s Saturday and the baked goods submission process has just opened. This year, it was a record turnout with 4,135 submissions, up by 30 percent from 2025.
Among the participants lined up is Jill Stanton of Minneapolis who waits with a tote bag of Tupperware of her cookie entries. In her nearly decade of submitting cookies, she has landed a single fourth place ribbon.
“We’re all here for the joy of it,” Stanton said. “If you ask anybody in line, I don’t think anyone here is gonna say like ‘I’m here for the ribbons.’”
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For Stanton, she’s got six entries — all cookies. They’re her “wheelhouse,” she said. For years, she’s hosted a bake-a-thon weekend with her friends during the holidays where they bake all day and into the early morning.
Those weekends became a training ground, with built-in taste-testers and ample ingredients, but rarely, as they crank out dozens of cookies, do they consider the same criteria the fair judge’s use. For example, a baker only enters four cookies per batch and their appearance has to match.
“I swear, I probably spent more than an hour just looking,” she said. “They have to look good and they have to look consistent.”
Like any competitor with a superstitious ritual, Stanton has one of her own.
“I’ve never needed it, but I bring two containers of each cookie in case I’m standing in line or I'm walking over there and something happens and I break a cookie.”
Farther down the line, Katie Kelly carries her culinary masterpiece: banana bread. It’s her third year entering a baked good and each time, she changes it up, experimenting with a different category and recipe.
“I did put a little cardamom in. Don’t tell anyone,” she joked to her friend Anne Collingwood, who she bumped into while lining up.
Kelly’s joined in line by her 2-year-old daughter Louise and a friend who’s wrangling her. She jokes it’s her civic duty to participate in the fair.
“I love to like encourage anyone to do just anything. You can submit anything,” she giggles.
Collingwood carries four tightly wrapped submissions in a hamper. It’s a transportation method she adopted after a horror story they watched in real time last year when a woman dropped her entry while walking to the line.
“It was a cautionary tale for me because I didn't have anything like this last year,” she said. “I gotta have the stuff contained. The bread underneath here is inside of a shoebox, inside of a bag.”
They spent Friday and Saturday baking. It’s a system they say works for them, while others mix cookie dough and freeze it.
“There’s calculation there. I love that,” Kelly said. “I feel like we operate on a different, we have like a millennial approach. It’s just like vibes and chaos.”
Both Collingwood and Kelly have a tradition to make their way through the Creative Activities Building during the fair, filling their phone’s camera rolls with ideas for next year.
“I just love being able to be a part of my favorite thing on the earth, the fair,” Collingwood said.
For Kelly, it’s important to pass on that State Fair love to her daughter. Three years ago, she learned after she dropped off her baked goods, that she was pregnant.
“I felt really sick, and I thought it was because I had been like eating too many cookies,” she said. “I had to make my husband eat the rest of the cookies to test them, and then I went and got a pregnancy test after I dropped off my baked goods. So she’s been to the State Fair like four or five times, in and out of utero.”
Baked goods aren’t the only submissions
The nickname for Paul Chouinard's State Fair maple syrup tells a different part of the story.
“With all of our friends knowing about the syrup, they were all excited for me, and they were sure I was going to win a ribbon,” he said. “When I came home empty-handed, we all jokingly called it the loser syrup.”
This year, Chouinard is up against over 150 other maple syrup competitors.
Chouinard began making maple syrup during the COVID pandemic. During that time, he could monitor the sugaring process while working from his home in the aptly named suburb of Maple Grove.
It’s hard to believe with the thick August foliage, that just months ago a network of tubing, 5-gallon pails and spiles hung from trunks and littered the forest floor. In early spring, he spends weeks collecting sap from about half their trees and boiling the nearly 100 gallons down.
One of his biggest challenges is boiling it down throughout the day after returning to work, but Chouinard, who is an engineer by trade and has always enjoyed tinkering, quickly got to work.
“I came up with a pump. So the pump will actually top off the sap as it boils down, and so it can run now essentially and tend to itself for periods of time,” he said.
He’s even made his own boiling system that alerts to temperature fluctuations. After years of modifying his set-up, what keeps him coming back is bigger than any possibility of a ribbon.
“It’s community too, right? You go there and you kind of appreciate how much time and effort people pour into these entries and the pride that they take in them,” he said.
Fine arts and craft submissions scheme for an entry point
K Daphnae Koop has tried submitting a fine arts entry for over 25 years, but has been rejected each time.
“There’s been years when it’s been really disappointing, but quite honestly, once I started approaching 20 [entries], I started getting kind of proud of it, like ‘my perfect record,’” Koop said.
Koop, who’s based in the Northrop King Building in northeast Minneapolis, has been an artist for over 50 years. She works with almost entirely recycled mixed media on carved wood, often with shattered glass and other materials inlaid into the surface.
“There have been years where I really felt like, ‘Oh, this piece — they're going to love it’ and have been very surprised at my rejections,” she said. “And there have been years where I've thought, ‘oh, this one's a little bit iffy.’”
She admits her work is unusual and may not translate as impactfully in a photograph – which is how they submit now — compared to in person.
“It mostly baffles me because sometimes I go to the State Fair and I think ‘that got in and mine didn't?’” she said.
As for handcraft submissions, Stanton also submits pieces. This year, one of her submissions was a Rebel Loon design made from pull tabs and meat raffle tickets she’s gathered for months with the help of friends and a local bar.
Her entries are for the “other” category. Often she doesn’t see anything like her designs.
Last year, she won a fourth-place ribbon for an 8x11 blue ribbon fashioned from copies of previous submission rate sheets.
“There was comment on one of my rate sheets that said ‘interesting.’ And I was like, ‘That is so Minnesotan.’ So I put that in the center circle of the blue ribbon, and guess what was on my rate sheet for that handcraft? ‘Interesting.’” she said.
“That was kind of perfect, right? That it that the ‘interesting’ got an ‘interesting. I had labeled it ‘my biggest achievement in nine years of creative activities competition.’”
