Butter Tart Festival to bring bakers across the region to Orangeville’s Alder Street Recreation Centre

April 4, 2025 · 0 Comments

By Joshua Drakes

Butter tart lovers, mark your calendars — Orangeville’s Butter Tart Festival is set for May 3.

From 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., the Alder Street Recreation Centre will be transformed into a market featuring vendors and bakers from across the province. Attendees can enjoy unique tart recipes and browse other goods available for purchase from local vendors. Admission is $6.

Jackie Psutka, the festival’s organizer and founder, said the event is all about highlighting bakers and vendors.

“The festival is bringing multiple bakers from all over Ontario to one location because everybody just seems to love butter tarts around Ontario and Canada,” she said. “We’re going to have a vendor marketplace, like a spring market, where people can shop among small businesses, looking for those spring décor items or Mother’s Day gifts and stuff like that.”

A competitive element will also be part of the festival. Participants will put their butter tarts to the test before a panel of judges, with winners taking home a trophy. Contestants will be judged on several different aspects, such as crust, filling, taste, and overall appearance.

Alongside the butter tart focus, the festival will feature a hot sauce component. Much like the tart vendors, local hot sauce makers will have a dedicated space to sell their homemade recipes.

“So we’ve got multiple hot sauce vendors at the event as well,” Psutka said. “A lot of people love their hot sauces too, so it’s kind of like a butter tart and a hot sauce festival all in one, but we’re just calling it ‘For The Love of Butter Tarts.’”

To entertain visitors and their kids, live music and family-friendly activities will be available.

“We are also going to be having some live music,” Psutka said. “We have a gentleman named Tyler Fry, from Elmira, and he’s going to be playing from 11 a.m. until 3 p.m. on the day of the event. We’re also going to have a balloon twister there for the kids.”

Additionally, the festival is partnering with the Orangeville Food Bank to provide donations in the form of both food and monetary support. Visitors who bring a non-perishable food item for donation will receive a discount on their admission fee.

“The cost of the event to go in is $6, but if you bring a food donation, then you will get $1 off,” Psutka said. “And then anybody who doesn’t bring food or whatever, we will be donating $1 to the food bank as well. So we’re going to donate monetarily, regardless.”

This festival is relatively new to the province but has been steadily growing. Psutka said the idea came to her after recognizing the demand for butter tart festivals, as well as the distance people had to travel to attend existing ones.

“People just love their butter tarts around here in Ontario — it’s crazy,” she said. “I got the idea of doing my own festival in our area after visiting the biggest butter tart festival in Midland. I thought, well, it’s kind of a far distance for us to drive.”

Already working as an event planner, Psutka decided to bring the idea to life.

“Back in 2019, I thought I should try to recreate this, maybe on a bit of a smaller scale,” she said. “So we did our first butter tart festival in Kitchener at Bingemans in 2019,”

“And now we’ve had a lot of people ask us to bring it to Orangeville, so this will be our first year doing it in town,” Psutka added.

With a mix of sweet treats, spicy flavors, live entertainment, and community support, the Orangeville Butter Tart Festival promises to be a fun-filled day for all ages.