How TikTok-inspired dishes landed on the Minnesota State Fair’s new foods list

A Texas-based food vendor on the nationwide state- and county-fair circuit, Kelly Villareal’s holy grail was the Minnesota State Fair. She applied to join the Great Minnesota Get-Together 10 years in a row. But all her businesses — ice cream, kettle corn, pineapple whip — got rejected.

Then she submitted an idea seemingly plucked straight from TikTok: the viral chocolate strawberry cup. Her new business serves plump, fresh strawberries enrobed in melted Belgian chocolate with topping combinations that include the equally internet-famous Dubai chocolate, made with pistachio cream and crunchy kataifi.

This time, she got in.

Among the 33 new foods coming to the Minnesota State Fair in 2025 are a surprising number of trend-driven ideas making the leap from screen to fair stand. Smashburger tacos, croffles — and Villareal’s chocolate strawberry cup.

For her, choosing and then perfecting a trending food item was the ticket to Minnesota.

“I do believe that we see something, whether it’s on Instagram [or TikTok], and it’s like, wow, that’s doing amazing. How can we take that and really take it to the next level on a bigger scale, to get it out there?” Villareal said. “I’ll be on there and my mind is just buzzing, like, let’s do this.”

As vendors work to stand out at an event famous for over-the-top, deep-fried excess, social media platforms have become a wellspring of ideas for landing a coveted spot on the fair’s new foods list.

“Our vendors keep a really great pulse on what’s trending in the food and beverage industry,” said Maria Hayden, a Minnesota State Fair spokesperson. “Food content has just exploded online in popularity and brought international visibility to what kinds of foods are popular — not just in our region but around the world.”

When a specific food or dish ignites a conversation on social media, “that brings even more inspiration for people to pull from,” Hayden said.

Those conversations are only getting louder, says Sherif Mityas, a restaurant industry expert and CEO of Brix Holdings, a national restaurant group with eight brands and 350 locations.

“The most posted items on TikTok and Instagram is food, so everyone with a phone becomes a mini-influencer, and you’ve got this word-of-mouth that becomes amplified,” Mityas said.

Food businesses are taking notice — and cashing in, from major chains to fair vendors.

“When trends start to go viral, they know that’s going to draw traffic, and that’s going to draw people to come in and try this establishment. That’s going to create buzz,” Mityas said. “Everyone should be doing it, because at the end of the day, everyone’s livelihood is traffic.”

The process of taking a dish from recipe to official new fair food is highly competitive, sometimes taking vendors years to accomplish. So the fact that so many of-the-moment creations are showing up so quickly in the application pool is notable, Hayden said.

“This year, we saw quite a few new vendors that had flavors and different products that we know people have been wanting to try after seeing them online,” she said. “We’re just really excited when we see those things come through.”

Fair food trends always emerge. Recent years brought waves of hot honey drizzles, dill pickle seasoning, edible cookie dough and birthday cake.

But while those flavor-based trends burned hot (some still do), this year’s viral food-inspired dishes stand out for their visual-first appeal.

Minnesota-based Gass Station Grill has landed on the new foods list five times in the past decade. This time, owners Craig and Jean Gass tapped their daughter Melissa Gass-Gottschalk and son-in-law Craig Gottschalk to develop a contender for their Food Building stand.

Social media played a role.

“The brains of it is really Melissa — she had this idea for a new burger and noticed this TikTok sensation where people were doing different versions of a smash burger using tortillas,” Gottschalk said. “So we just started playing around and experimenting.”

The result: the Smashadilla — smashed seasoned ground beef with Gouda, caramelized onions, lettuce, pickles and a special sauce, grilled on a flour tortilla.

Benjamin Smith and his wife Tevy Phann-Smith of Spinning Wylde are always dreaming up new menu items spun from their lineup of natural cotton candy flavors.

The croffle, or croissant waffle, is hot on social media right now, so they created their own version: the Croffle Cloud. It’s a croissant pressed in a waffle iron, topped with whipped sweet cream, fruit purée and their signature cotton candy clouds.

“I think with everything that we do we’re also keeping an eye on trends and what’s going to be photo-worthy, because we know people like to get pictures of food,” Smith said of the item debuting at their Baldwin Park fair stand.

But it’s not only about looks.

“Croissants are a staple for our family and we have a recipe for whipped cream that is really, really good, and we just put it all together,” said Smith, whose cotton candy stand also operates year-round at Maplewood Mall. “As far as being able to pump out thousands and thousands of these, it works out, too.”

Even with so many trending dishes joining the lineup, plenty of cozy and nostalgic options made the cut, too. The Minnesota staple Top the Tater will be a condiment at two booths. Minneapolis pizza phenom Wrecktangle is transforming a grandmother’s coffee cake recipe into the ends of an ice cream sandwich for West End Creamery. And Sara’s Tipsy Pies is offering simple dough scraps dusted with cinnamon and sugar, a classic baking-with-grandma treat if there ever were one.

“It’s not that we’re seeking out every single viral item to put on the list,” Hayden said. “It really is about balance.”