GILROY
– Randy Costa, president of the 1999 Garlic Festival, caused
some ripples in Gilroy when he decided to make some major changes
to the heart of the event – Gourmet Alley.
GILROY – Randy Costa, president of the 1999 Garlic Festival, caused some ripples in Gilroy when he decided to make some major changes to the heart of the event – Gourmet Alley.
The big news of the festival that year was the introduction of two new dishes cooked in the Gourmet Alley tent. Food developer Val Filice created recipes for a chicken polenta as well as a sausage with polenta, and the festival promoted them with extensive advertising and marketing.
Turns out the dishes proved a big hit, as many guests tried them and found them quite tasty, recalls Costa, who is a partner at Gilroy’s Headstart Nursery.
“We always bill ourselves as the premiere food festival, so we feel we should always offer something new,” he said. “People came out, we marketed so much.”
Costa also wanted to find a way to reduce the long lines guests faced waiting for food at Gourmet Alley. So he set up a sales tent in the ranch side of the park, allowing more servers to interact with customers. This improvement allowed people to enjoy their food faster and spend more time enjoying the entertainment and merchandise.
“Over the years, we always had huge lines because people love the food so much,” he said. “It’s great product, but people can only wait so long. I think that was really successful.”
The weather gods smiled down on the 1999 Garlic Festival weekend, drawing 126,000 people, the second highest attendance in 10 years.
“We had great weather. It was like 85 degrees every day,” Costa said. “Believe it or not, all the things that presidents do all year long, it really comes down to the weather. … I knew everything else we could control but the weather – that’s out of our hand.
“When the weather is great, everything is going to fall into place.”
In 1999, Costa also presented an economic impact study to the City of Gilroy to show how much the community brought in financially from the festival each year as guests shopped at local stores, ate at restaurants, stayed at hotels and used the services of other businesses.
“We were able to show through an independent company how much money the festival brings into the community,” he said. “It was in the millions of dollars – about $3 to $4 million. That was huge for a three-day event.”
Increasing the profits brought in by the festival was another concern for Costa, especially because so many of the 150 non-profit organizations that volunteer have grown dependent on the event for their financial well-being.
“I remember we did a lot of things to reduce costs,” he said. “I think we were able to increase the donation back to charities by 15 percent compared with previous years. That was a good increase. It’s like any business. You have to look at costs.”
That year, the festival provided charities with $224,000 and put another $100,000 in reserve funds, he said.
Adding to the stress of serving as festival president that year, Costa and his family also had to deal with remodeling a kitchen during the summer months. His wife Ann found a number of creative ways to cook using a barbeque, he remembers with a chuckle. Ann also had to take care of young sons Kevin and Thomas, so she couldn’t help out with the festival much.
“But all things considered, everything went great,” Costa said.
Over the years, the festival has changed its focused to becoming a more family-oriented event, he said. The first few years, the festival centered much more on serving alcohol and this created safety concerns with rowdy guests. But wine and beer are no longer emphasized as much now as the cuisine, merchandise and entertainment.
“The customers we get are family people,” he said. “There are really no major issues any more. … Nowadays, it has to be looked at in a very different way than what it was early on.
“We have to take a business approach.”
