San Diego County Fair breaks attendance record in 2009

Photo by Dave Gatley

A record 1,274,442 people attended the San Diego County Fair this year, fair organizers announced Monday.

The 22-day event, which ended Sunday, broke the previous attendance record of 1,265,997 set in 2007, according to Tim Fennell, chief executive and general manager of the Del Mar Fairgrounds.

“We want to thank everyone for coming and hope they had a great start to the summer at the San Diego County Fair,” Fennell said. “We are pleased to provide our community and families with an opportunity to have fun and play for a day at the fair during a difficult economy.”

The largest one-day attendance record set during the 2009 fair was July 3, with 88,087 people flocking to the fairgrounds. It was the eighth largest one-day attendance record in the fair’s history.

Food sales at the fair on July 3 totaled $886,000, according to fair officials.

Throughout the entire fair, vendors sold 8,000 zucchini weenies, 10,000 deep fried S’mores, 13,000 deep fried Twinkies, 28,000 deep fried Oreos, 5,000 Deep Fried White Castle Cheese Burgers, 2,000 pounds of deep fried frog legs, 6,000 deep fried avocados, 12,000 Mexican funnel cakes, 2,000 apple fries, 20,000 pieces of chocolate bacon, more than 5,200 meatball sliders and 7,000 Indian fry breads.

See related: Eight great heart-stoppers at the Fair

A total of 220 pies were consumed as part a pie eating contest, while 500 jalapenos were swallowed by 24 participants in three separate jalapeno eating contests.

Tags: county, deep fried, Del Mar Fairgrounds, fair, SDNN, Uncategorized

This entry was posted on Monday, July 6th, 2009 at 7:46 am and is filed under Food, Lifestyle, Local News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.