Scenic Rim runs Eat Local month

Scenic Rim’s big food festival is back — and the real story is not just that there are lots of lunches and farm tours on the calendar. It’s that a regional Queensland destination is using food as an economic engine. Eat Local Month runs from May 29 to June 30 this year, and the 2026 edition is the biggest yet, with more than 150 events across farms, wineries, distilleries and local venues. It also marks the festival’s 15th year, which tells you this is no longer a cute niche idea. It’s a mature tourism product now. ### What actually launched? The 2026 Scenic Rim Eat Local Month program went live in late April, with Scenic Rim Regional Council and the festival site laying out a month-long lineup built around growers, makers, chefs and hospitality operators. The dates matter here: despite some loose references to “May,” the official run is May 29 to June 30, 2026. That puts the festival squarely into the Australian winter tourism window, when southeast Queensland can sell cool-weather road trips without the misery of a real winter. (scenicrim.qld.gov.au) ### What is the festival selling? Basically, access. Not just meals, but proximity to the people who grow, raise, ferment, bake, bottle and cook the food. The program is built around “paddock to plate” experiences — long lunches on farms, open-gate visits, workshops, tastings, dinners and family outings. That phrase gets overused, but here it’s literal: visitors are being invited onto working properties and into production spaces, not just restaurants with rustic branding. (scenicrim.qld.gov.au) ### How big is this year’s version? It’s meaningfully bigger than the older versions people might remember. The official 2026 material says there are 150-plus events, while nearby coverage pegs the total at 153. Last year’s program was described as 100-plus events, and the 2022 version had more than 125 events at 42 locations. So the arc is pretty clear — this thing has been scaling up, not coasting on a familiar name. (eatlocalmonth.com.au) ### Why lean so hard on farms? Because the Scenic Rim’s advantage is not urban dining. It’s geography. The region sits about an hour from Brisbane and the Gold Coast, which makes it close enough for day-trippers but rural enough to feel like an escape. Food is the hook, but the product is really a short-break itinerary — drive out, meet producers, buy local goods, stay overnight, post the scenery, repeat. That is much more valuable to a region than a one-off dinner booking. (eatlocalmonth.com.au) ### Why does the 15-year mark matter? Because longevity changes the category. A first-year festival is a gamble. A 15-year festival is infrastructure. It gives farmers and venues something they can plan around, and it gives tourism marketers a repeatable seasonal story. Scenic Rim Regional Council is openly framing the month as a flagship celebration of the region’s produce, farming heritage and country hospitality — which is another way of saying the festival now helps define the place itself. (eatlocalmonth.com.au) ### Is this just for tourists? Not really. Tourists are the obvious audience, but the supply-chain angle matters too. Events like these let producers sell direct, build brand recognition and turn “local food” from an abstract virtue into something visitors can taste and buy. Think of it as a showroom for the region’s agriculture — except the showroom is a vineyard, a dairy, a paddock or a distillery. (scenicrim.qld.gov.au) ### So what’s the bottom line? Eat Local Month is not just a festival announcement. It’s Scenic Rim showing how regional tourism works when it has a clear identity. The region is packaging farms, food and hospitality into a recurring reason to visit — and after 15 years, that looks less like promotion and more like strategy. (scenicrim.qld.gov.au) (eatlocalmonth.com.au)