Born from an inside joke, St. Pete's celebration of collard greens is now one of the biggest food festivals in Tampa Bay

On any given weekend in Florida, there’s probably a food festival happening within the state—whether it celebrates a holiday, specific food or style of cooking. Somewhere in between Plant City’s annual springtime celebration of strawberries and the Sunshine State’s plethora of seafood fests in the fall and winter, lies the Tampa Bay Collard Green Festival.

Now in its seventh year, this locally-organized festival has built a reputation for being far more than a run-of-the-mill foodie event. Organizers Samantha Harris and Boyzell Hosey are on the precipice of hosting yet another day-long celebration of community, nourishment, health, wellness and Black culture.

What started as a joke between church friends in 2017 has evolved into a no-cover, Tampa Bay-wide festivity full of dozens of local vendors and food trucks, a variety of healthy cooking and fitness demonstrations, a collard green cook-off, live entertainment, fresh collard giveaways, and urban agriculture education. A presentation from two-time James Beard Award winner Adrian E. Miller, aka “The Soul Food Scholar,” is on the menu this weekend, too.

Harris and Hosey met at St. Pete’s Bethel Community Baptist Church nearly a decade ago and eventually struck up a conversation about one of their favorite foods: collard greens.

“We initially bonded over the fact that we both prefer no meat in our collard greens,” says Harris.“ We eventually started cooking greens to help raise money to send kids in the youth program to a church conference in Ohio. We saw the positive effect of selling greens at church, and we wanted to bring that same energy to the community around us.”

After the initial church fundraiser, Harris and Hosey toyed with the idea of selling greens at St. Pete’s annual MLK Day parade, but it didn’t pan out. The next step—which was proposed in a semi-joking manner—was to start a collard green festival of their own.

“Nobody has laughed harder than Boyzell and I when we first came up with the festival name—I swear we laughed for 15 minutes because it just seemed ridiculous at the time,” Harris tells Creative Loafing Tampa Bay.

After the friends made the drive to Snellville, Georgia to attend the OG Collard Greens Cultural Festival in 2017, they knew that they could pull off something similar in the heart of southside St. Pete. Later that year, they formed the Tampa Bay Collard Green Festival nonprofit and hosted the inaugural event in 2018.

In its first year, the festival drew about 1,000 folks, while last year’s event saw a record-breaking attendance of 8,000. Harris expects even more festival-goers on Saturday.

The 2024 Tampa Bay Collard Green Festival returns to St. Pete’s Woodson African American Museum of Florida (2240 9th Ave. S) on Saturday, Feb. 17 from 9 a.m.-5 p.m. As always, there’s no cost to attend—and both Harris and Hosey absolutely plan to keep it that way.

Through donations from locals, big name sponsors Publix, Johns Hopkins, Bayfront Health, HMC Hospitality Group and JP Morgan, a longtime partnership with the Culinary Federation of America—which organizes a collard green recipe contest for local highschoolers each year—the festival is able to remain free. But over the next few years, Harris and Hosey hope to also start fundraising for kid’s scholarships and other local nonprofits.

“Our goal going forward is to solidify the infrastructure of the organization to achieve some sort of long-term sustainability—we’re looking into doing more continuous programming throughout the year,” Hosey tells CL. “It takes a sustained effort and a certain amount of fundraising to get to that level. And in our seventh year, we're not quite there yet.”

And in the midst of intensely preparing for the event and checking off boxes on their never-ending to-do lists, both Harris and Hosey reflect on the festival’s origins and more importantly—its future. “When I think about the festival and what it means, it’s really about connecting people with their community. As a storyteller and a journalist, the thing that I love about this festival is that it satisfies the desire within me to see people connect, share and talk with one another,” Hosey—who spent 24 years at the Tampa Bay Times and is the current Senior Editor of Visual Storytelling for ProPublica—explains. “I believe that storytelling is one of the central tenants that brings people together. It's not just about the food, it's the stories around the food.”

While the festival has experienced exponential growth since its inception in 2017, organizers and volunteers are proud that they’ve always remained true to its original , community-focused mission of “emphasizing education in food consumption, agricultural science, and improved lifestyle choices,” as detailed on tbcgf.org.

For future iterations of the festival, Harris would like to incorporate a live-action cooking competition, while Hosey ponders the more whimsical addition of a ferris wheel, so patrons can take in a “panoramic view of our beautiful community.”

And despite virtually outgrowing its makeshift festival grounds outside the Woodson African American Museum, both Harris and Hosey state that their intentional decision to host the event along South St. Pete’s historical Deuces district is an important connection between the city’s rich African American history and the cultural origins of their collard green fest.

“It’s easy to get caught up in the action of the event, but we always want to highlight the ‘why’ in all of this. We want to keep raising awareness in Black and brown communities of the alarming rates of heart disease and strokes that are changing our family dynamics across the country,” Harris says. “A lot of times the Black maternal figure is the household leader, and when they encounter these health problems, it can be detrimental to the family structure. And as an African American mother, that hits home for me. It's happened in my family and I've seen it in other families around us.”

Like the organizing of the festival itself, collard greens have always been a labor of love—from the time it takes to strip the leaves from the stem and vigorous rinsing process to its low-and-slow cooking methodology—but the end product always seems to be worth it. While collards (accompanied with black eyed peas), can help signify luck and prosperity in the new year, St. Pete’s annual collard green festival can help turn those hopeful wishes into reality each and every February.

St. Pete boasts a reputation for hosting one of the country’s longest-running MLK Day parades over the past four-ish decades, and it’s not presumptuous to say that the Tampa Bay Collard Green Festival has the same sort of organic, community-focused momentum that may secure the event as another Black History Month mainstay in The ‘Burg.

For the latest updates on 2024’s Tampa Bay Collard Green Festival. head to its Facebook or Instagram, both @TampaBayCGF.

The festival also hosts a kick-off party across the bridge at Ybor City’s Cuban Club called “Collards After Dark,” where Adrian E. Miller will discuss the favorite cocktails of former U.S. presidents on Friday, Feb. 16. Subscribe to Creative Loafing newsletters.

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