Franklin’s popular Taste of Franklin restaurant sampling event won’t be held this summer due to restaurant staffing shortages.
“The restaurants have been kept busy just keeping themselves going with their own staffing,” Jennifer Taylor, head of the Franklin Retail Association, said Thursday.
She said Taste of Franklin has been around since the 1990s to promote the city’s restaurants so “people could taste the food and then come to the restaurants.”
“We want to promote and help the restaurants, and if it’s too overwhelming for them because of staffing issues, there’s no point to having it,” she said.
“COVID changed the world,” Taylor said, adding that the Retail Association doesn’t want to cancel the event forever, but “the landscape just looks different this year. It’s not that the restaurants don’t want to do it, but they just can’t confirm something that far out.”
Only six vendors had confirmed they could participate in Taste of Franklin, Taylor said, and of those, four were restaurants.
While she hadn’t talked to all the restaurants, those she did speak with mentioned staffing shortages, and Taylor said it was an issue that had come up in discussions with other event planners as well.
Many restaurants just didn’t respond, she said, and while the Retail Association could have waited to see if more responses came in, “with an event like this, the longer you wait, the harder it is to say you can’t do it. We didn’t want to have more people say they couldn’t do it at the last minute, and then end up with a lackluster event,” she said.
Ronnie Beith, Franklin’s events and marketing coordinator, said Taste of Franklin was “really a fundraiser for the Retail Association, and the Arts Council helps out by providing entertainment.”
“We feel very badly, but that’s how it is this year,” Beith added. She said that to the best of her memory, she didn’t think the event had ever been canceled, not even because of rain.
“It’s a sign of the times,” she said.
Beith doesn’t expect the cancellation to have any negative impact on the weeks-long Taste of Talent competition, which starts around the Fourth of July and has wrapped up with the finals on the Sunday of Taste of Franklin.
Taylor added the cancellation won’t hurt downtown Franklin retail businesses because they aren’t open on Sundays.
“It may only be this year that we cancel it,” Taylor said. “We want to look at everything and figure out the best path going forward.”
