Each July, for three gloriously briny days (this year from Julyâ¯11–13), Downtown Pittsburgh smells like dill and deepâfry. The Rachel Carson Bridge shuts down to traffic and fills with pickle hats, green glitter, food vendors, and the unmistakable shadow of a 35âfoot inflatable Heinz pickle overhead. You’re more likely to spot someone sipping pickle juice from a Solo cup than drinking water, as the city leans all the way into one of its most beloved flavor profiles: absurd.
It’s this blend of spectacle and silliness that first won over Nick Rogers.
“Picklesburgh was my introduction to Pittsburgh,” Rogers, a teaching assistant professor of sociology at the University of Pittsburgh, tells Pittsburgh City Paper. “I was downtown, apartment hunting, and this giant inflatable pickle was floating over a bridge. I thought, well, this is a city that knows exactly who it is.”
Rogers is also a former food festival founder in Arkansas, a deep thinker about the meaning of collective joy, and, as it turns out, a sucker for brine. His delight at stumbling into Picklesburgh was both personal and anthropological. “It instantly endeared the city to me,” he says. “Picklesburgh felt familiar and at home. It told me this was a place that values community and has a sense of humor about itself.”
Since that moment, Picklesburgh has only grown more audacious.
Now in its 10th year, Picklesburgh has morphed from a quirky food fest into a civic phenomenon, drawing over 250,000 people to Downtown last year alone — a nearly 1,000% increase since its 2015 debut. Every summer, fans return for pickle-flavored beer, deep-fried pickles, pickleback shots, and the city’s favorite inflatable mascot, hovering above the crowd like a patron saint of Pittsburgh eccentricity. Vendors hawk dill pickle doughnuts, spicy kimchi, and jars of achaar from South Asian grandmas. There’s live music, face painting, and the infamous pickle juice drinking contest, to name a few activities.
The pickle juice contest has been a staple since the very beginning. TikTok star Jalen Franco set the all-time record during the 2022 Picklesburgh pickle-juice-chugging contest. He guzzled an entire quartâsized jar of pickle juice in just 4.5 seconds, earning him the title of “Mayor of Picklesburgh.”
“That was my very first time in Pittsburgh,” Franco tells City Paper. “And there’s something very special about the energy of the city and its people. The fact that this massive festival takes over the heart of Downtown, celebrating something as oddly specific as pickles, right along a beautiful river, and somehow it all just works.”
Franco was invited to compete in the 2022 Picklesburgh pickle juice chugging contest by the Pittsburgh Downtown Partnership after his online videos of chugging went viral during the pandemic. “I had never chugged pickle juice before, and honestly didn’t even know pickle festivals were a thing, but I was all in.” His entry into the competition turned out to be a cultural moment of its own. Within three hours of posting his win, his TikTok video had over 12 million views. “By the end of the night, it was sitting at 18 million.”
That night, the internet wasn’t the only place buzzing. He and his friend, who flew out from Albuquerque to film him, were recognized on the streets of Pittsburgh. “Over the next week, the video climbed past 24 million views, and clips of it were reposted everywhere — Barstool [Sports], ESPN, House of Highlights, SportsCenter — totaling more than 100 million additional views.” he says.
As for a comeback? “I’d say I left my mark on Picklesburgh. But if someone ever breaks my record … you might just see me back.”
Briny Business
Picklesburgh has also woven its way into business plans. While the crowd is chugging, crunching, and selfie-snapping, Picklesburgh vendors are hustling behind the scenes.
The Pittsburgh Pickle Company launched in 2015, the same year Picklesburgh debuted, and has been a fixture at the festival ever since. “They needed a local pickle company to represent, and we just happened to be there,” co-founder John Patterson tells City Paper. The company grew alongside the event, transitioning from serving deep-fried pickles at The BeerHive, their Strip District bar, to selling thousands of $5 burgers topped with house pickles at their bustling booth. “We sold around 4,000 hamburgers,” Patterson says. “They were one of the cheapest items at the festival, and people loved them.”
Still, even after a decade, Patterson admits his view of the event is mostly one from inside the booth. “I’ve been at Picklesburgh for 10 years and haven’t really seen Picklesburgh. Our booth is crazy busy, although this year we have extra help, so maybe we’ll get to try some weird stuff out,” he says.
And if he does, he knows what to expect: the weird is welcome.
“One year, we got creative and made a dessert that still gets talked about,” Patterson says. “It had graham crackers, vanilla pudding, and our sweet cinnamon pickles. It ended up tasting like apple pie.” They called it a pickle parfait. “Very bizarre, but also very delicious.”
For all the pickleback shots and viral moments, Rogers believes Picklesburgh is doing something deeper.
“Encountering the event in my first few days let me know, if it wasn’t already obvious, the degree to which Pittsburgh is a proud city,” he says. “A city that strives for a sense of collective identity … a city where maintaining social ties across divisions like class and background and race is important. And so that made me feel a lot of fondness for Pittsburgh right from the beginning.”
As a sociologist, Rogers has studied how communities build and maintain identity through shared rituals and food. “Food has always been a way to craft an identity. Individual people and also for collectives,” he explained. “The phenomenon of comfort food, for example, reminds us who we are, where we came from. That same sort of magic can take place at scale at the community level or the city level.”
That’s exactly what he saw in Picklesburgh.
Rogers points to other cultures where food isn’t just sustenance, but identity. In Central America, for example, the descendants of ancient Mayans refer to themselves as the people of corn, defining themselves by their culture’s love for and dependence on the food staple.
He brings up Iceland too, where eating hákarl (fermented shark) is a point of pride. “It reminds them that we are a unique people that do a unique thing. And other cultures not only don’t do this thing, but probably wouldn’t want to do this thing. And that makes us unique.”
In Pittsburgh, Rogers suggests, that identity marker might just be the pickle. Not long after moving to the city, Rogers posed a deceptively simple question to his undergraduate students: What is Pittsburgh food? They turned it into a full-on research project, surveying locals, interviewing chefs, and digging through restaurant menus in search of an answer.
“Pickles were the third-most frequently mentioned food item,” Rogers says, “Behind pierogies and putting French fries on things.”
The results revealed a bit of a split. On one side were the usual suspects: pierogies, pickles, and sausage. On the other was a growing desire among newer immigrant communities to see Pittsburgh’s food identity expand to include more global influences.
Still, pickles just kept showing up.
“One thing you’ll see is that Pittsburgh people love pickles,” Rogers says. “And they think of them as, you know, a central part of Pittsburgh cuisine.”
The clincher? When the team asked residents what they’d serve as a four-course Pittsburgh meal to someone visiting the city for the first time, guess what made the menu as the hors d’oeuvre? Pickles.
Pickles VS. DIY
When we think of pickles, especially with the Heinz name so prominently involved in the festival, Rogers says, “what we think of is more these mass market industrial products.”
But that’s only part of the story.
“Despite that surface-level industrial connotation, the act of pickling something is sort of quintessentially a do-it-yourself, at-home act,” Rogers says. “In a time when more people are starting to be thoughtful about where their food comes from, pickling things is like baking bread. It’s an entry-level activity that can introduce people to the joy of preparing their own food.”
Emily Ruby, a curator at the Heinz History Center, sees the same thing.
“There has been a recent resurgence of interest in home pickling,” Ruby says. “People got into it again during the pandemic, like they did with bread baking.”
Pickling, after all, long predates Heinz. It arrived in Pittsburgh in the trunks of immigrants from Polish ogórki kiszone (fermented dill pickles) to German sauerkraut to Italian giardiniera. But the rise of Heinz changed everything. Founded in 1869, the company became one of the largest food producers in the world and helped create the very idea of a national food brand.
“Heinz’s genius was to create products that were trustworthy and convenient,” Ruby explains. “That shift from home preservation to store-bought goods coincided with a broader move from local barter to national brands. By the 1860s and beyond, you could buy Heinz in California just like in Pittsburgh. That was revolutionary.”
Even the branding was ahead of its time. The pickle pin, launched at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, became more than a giveaway — it was cultural currency.
“It started as a collectible charm and became one of the most successful marketing tools ever,” Ruby says.
Factory tours at Heinz, once a rite of passage for Pittsburgh kids, ended in the 1970s. But the hometown pride hasn’t faded.
“Even though Heinz isn’t really here anymore, people still take pride in it starting here,” Ruby says. “The festival is a way to keep that alive.”
Which is why, even under the shadow of the Heinz banner, Picklesburgh makes room for something else. There are tiny booths run by first-time entrepreneurs with hand-labeled jars of turmeric carrots or ramp pickles. Some come from family recipes. Some are pure TikTok whimsy.
At its core, Picklesburgh is two things at once: a celebration of Pittsburgh’s food industry legacy and a test kitchen for the next generation. It’s a place where fermenters, home cooks, chefs, and small-batch artisans all push beyond the Heinz jar.
Why We Need Silly Festivals
Of course, not everyone thinks so hard about Picklesburgh, and that’s kind of the point.
“It’s not solemn like a church revival. It’s not antagonistic like a football game,” says Rogers. “Picklesburgh is about collective silliness. It’s about joy.”
And in a post-pandemic world, Rogers says that joy matters more than ever. “Coming out of COVID, I think there was a hunger for pure, frivolous, public fun. Picklesburgh exploded in popularity. People needed a reason to laugh and gather. We all needed a release valve.”
The festival’s 10th anniversary is leaning into that release. This year, it’s going bolder, weirder, and brighter than ever. The newest addition — dubbed “Pickle Riding” — is sponsored by the Pittsburgh Downtown Partnership and Flyspace Productions, with support from Pella Windows and Doors. The attraction invites brave riders to “ride the dill and show your skill” as they cling to a bucking gherkin similar to a mechanical bull, near PPG Plaza.
There’s also a limited-edition anniversary T-shirt, designed in collaboration with Pittsburgh-based Clockwise, featuring the iconic floating pickle balloon set against the city skyline.
The festival has officially outgrown its footprint. Organizers are already brainstorming how to handle the surging crowds in years ahead. But even as it grows, Picklesburgh hasn’t lost what makes it matter.
“One of the oldest ideas in sociology comes from French sociologist Émile Durkheim, who says that the survival and success of a society depends upon members of that society feeling a sense of solidarity with each other,” Rogers explains. “For Durkheim, who talked a lot about this in the context of why societies need religion, he talked about the importance of these solidarity rituals.”
Picklesburgh may not be a tent revival, but it’s still a ritual. And a surprisingly powerful one.
It brings people together through what Durkheim called collective effervescence — the shared joy of doing something ridiculous, side by side.
“It’s kind of a public absurdity,” Rogers says. “But that absurdity reminds us of who we are. It connects us. Everything about Picklesburgh signals that this is not something we’re supposed to take too seriously. It is something where we just reflect on shared enjoyment, whether it’s the big inflatable pickle, the pickle juice drinking contest, or the fact that so many of the vendors are selling foods that we probably wouldn’t want to eat as a daily occurrence.”
And yet, for one weekend a year, we do.
The Pickle as Pittsburgh’s Compass
For a city still finding its footing post-industry, post-pandemic, post-modern everything, Picklesburgh is more than a party.
“At the individual level, we call it an identity crisis,” Rogers says. “That can happen to cities, too. And for better or worse, Pittsburgh is in one of those periods of transition.”
That transition isn’t always easy to pin down. Pittsburgh is no longer the blue-collar food town it once was, but it hasn’t fully become the cosmopolitan melting pot it’s inching toward either. It’s in-between.
And somehow, a pickle holds it all together.
“It reconnects us to who we’ve been,” Rogers says, “and maybe helps focus us on who we’d like to be. Whether that’s incorporating playfulness and whimsy into who we are, or reclaiming do-it-yourself foodways. When people feel disconnected, festivals like Picklesburgh remind them they still belong. That their city has flavor. And that they’re part of it.”
Picklesburgh is, in essence, not just about brine. It’s about belonging.
This article appears in Jul 9-15, 2025.
