Nostalgic Cravings at the Minnesota State Fair

In the lead-up to the Minnesota State Fair, a twelve-day fête of starch and fat which marks the end of every summer, the event’s organizers release a highly anticipated list of competitively decadent new fair foods. The débutantes of 2025 included chicken-fried bacon, Grandma Doreen’s Dessert Dog (vanilla ice cream encased in slabs of coffee cake, on a stick), and the Uncrustaburger (with deep-fried peanut-butter-and-jelly Uncrustables instead of a bun). Other new entries painted a picture of Minnesota’s evolving tastes and demographics. Baba’s, a Palestinian American hummus company based in Minneapolis, unveiled the Fawaffle, topped with a generous scoop of tahini butter, cherry tomatoes, and fresh mint. A window run by Minneapolis’s Midtown Global Market sold Somali Street Fries, smothered in stewy, spicy beef suqaar. Between snacks, I sipped a savory dill-pickle iced tea, garnished with a crunchy spear and a zesty Tajín rim.

The fair dates back to the eighteen-fifties, and was conceived as a showcase of the state’s flourishing agriculture, meant to attract settlers who might have otherwise continued to California. Today it sprawls across a permanent three-hundred-and-twenty-two-acre fairgrounds in St. Paul and draws some two million people a year. Attractions include kitschy traditions such as a butter-sculpting demonstration, in which a master carver crafts a bust of the winner of the annual Princess Kay of the Milky Way pageant, and the Miracle of Birth Center, displaying pens of expectant farm animals. (If you’re lucky, the staff will have just induced an enormous sow.) It’s perhaps most powerful, though, as a smorgasbord of Proustian attachments. Many of the most beloved food venders sell a single, time-honored classic: bubbling-hot, batter-fried cheese curds, as sparkly as nuggets of gold, from a stall called the Mouth Trap; the Corn Roast’s deeply burnished cobs, dunked in melted butter; crispy, wispy sweet-onion rings at Danielson’s & Daughters.

One vender rules them all: Sweet Martha’s Cookie Jar. You could say, metaphorically, that the streets of the Minnesota State Fair are paved with Sweet Martha’s chocolate-chip cookies. You could say it literally, too. Look down, as you’re tramping around in search of the All You Can Drink Milk stand (three dollars a ticket) or a cup of grilled peaches and cream from the Produce Exchange, and you’re likely to see a sandy, flattened cookie, pounded into the ground by thousands of feet. Sweet Martha’s, which operates three stands at the fair, is more lucrative than any other food purveyor by a huge margin. In 2024, it pulled in nearly five million dollars, more than twice as much as the next most successful vender, Pronto Pups, which sells a variation on a corn dog, dipped in pancake batter. The reason for the debris is not that people are discarding the cookies but, rather, the way they’re sold. Sweet Martha’s cookies are baked to order, then served warm in precariously tall stacks, teetering out of a paper cup, or, better yet, the stand’s signature plastic bucket, which gets loaded with about four dozen cookies despite fitting only three dozen. Veteran fairgoers know to bring ziplock bags to contain the excess, but cookie collateral is inevitable.

At seven-thirty on the first morning of this year’s fair, I met Sweet Martha herself at one of her stands just before it opened. Martha Rossini, who is short and slight, with dark hair cut into a blunt, chin-length bob, speaks with a pronounced Minnesota accent, all long “O”s. “At this time of day, I go, You know, it is a breakfast food—it has eggs in it!” she said. In 1978, Rossini was a twenty-eight-year-old art teacher when she decided she might try her hand at becoming a fair-food vender. The following year, she founded Sweet Martha’s with her then husband, Gary Olson, and their friend Neil O’Leary, hand-drawing the now iconic mascot: a bashful, knock-kneed cookie with long lashes and red pumps. In the early days, operating out of a small cart, Rossini served the cookies in paper cones, which couldn’t be folded up or stashed in a bag. “I wanted people to have to hold it,” she told me. “They walk down the street, and that’s my marketing.”

Though each of the Sweet Martha’s stands resembles an average commercial bakery—big, sterile-feeling rooms lined with industrial-sized stand mixers and walk-in ovens—the business has the spirit of a two-week summer camp. Like many of the fair’s venders, Sweet Martha’s is largely staffed by teen-agers. But it also employs a passionate contingent of former teen-agers, who return each summer with extraordinary reliability, sometimes from out of state. As Rossini stowed her purse in a tiny back office, a manager named Katie Atlas was onboarding a new employee, a young woman who fiddled nervously with her necklace. Atlas, who’d been a neighbor of Rossini’s and babysat her kids, worked her first fair in 1994, when she was fifteen. She hasn’t missed one since. “This was probably one of the first places I ever really felt accepted,” Atlas told me. “They valued me for my work ethic, and I became a part of something bigger, and a lot of fun. And so year after year, for me, it’s trying to capture those people who might need a little extra encouragement.”

Jen Olson, Rossini’s thirty-nine-year-old daughter, who lives in Los Angeles and works as a marketing consultant for the clothing label Dôen, told me she has never accepted a job offer without first securing the run of the fair as vacation time. Gary Bies, a self-described “St. Paul kid” who spends the rest of the year working at his family’s funeral home, has missed only one summer since 1988. “I did a six-year enlistment in the Navy, right? There was one year when I was transferring back from Japan and then going to San Diego, and it just wasn’t going to work,” he said. “But they were doing fair prep here, so I came and I painted a doorframe in the back of the building. I was on the payroll for one hour.”