Ontario’s Best Butter Tart Festival - Midland Hosting Annual Event for Ninth Year

Ontario’s Best Butter Tart Festival officially announced today that it will return to the Town of Midland’s downtown core and waterfront on June 10, 2023.

“Ontario’s Best Butter Tart Festival is one of the Town’s annual highlights and we can’t wait to welcome festival visitors to Midland this June,” said Mayor Bill Gordon. The Mayor will be at the festival to declare it open at 9 a.m., following the Piping of the Tart throughout the festival with the Midland Legion’s Pipes and Drums.

This award-winning which first began in 2013, is the original and largest butter tart festival in Canada, drawing 60,000 visitors for the one-day event.

“Ontarians love their butter tarts,” said Karen Mealing, Manager of Culture and Community with the Town of Midland and one of the festival organizers. “Whether you like your butter tarts plain or with raisins, with a runny or firm filling, or vegan or gluten-free, everyone will be able to find a favourite at our festival.”

In addition to the 200,000 plus butter tarts available that day, the festival features many downtown merchants who will expand their businesses onto the sidewalks in front of their establishments and more than 200 vendors selling everything from butter tarts to clothing, jewellery, home décor, personal care products, and hand-crafted items. There will be food trucks for those who aren’t just making butter tarts their sole food source for the day.

The free festival features the Dairy Farmers of Ontario Stage with live music by bands including Gibbons & Figgs, Memphis Mudd, and Kitty and the Boyz.

Other family-friendly activities include a Kids Zone at Harbourside Park as well as buskers and performers entertaining visitors throughout the festival.

Professional and amateur/home bakers will vie for the title of baking the Best Butter Tart at the Egg Farmers of Ontario Butter Tart Contest. 

Contest categories include Traditional (plain, raisin, pecan or walnut), and Wild Style (butter tarts with a non-traditional ingredient or two). For anyone interested in sampling the same tarts as the judges, mixed six-packs of contest butter tarts will be available for sale for $15.

Visitors can park offsite and enjoy travelling to and from the festival in free Faris Team Shuttles. Tourism Simcoe County and Cycle Simcoe will staff a free bike valet, and Town of Midland (Mid-Pen) Transit will run at no cost on festival day and provide a free festival shuttle back and forth to the Town of Penetanguishene.

Visitors looking for more information, including free shuttles and accessible parking, should visit www.buttertartfestival.ca and follow the festival on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.