Queen Creek Olive Mill is closing out its 13th annual Garlic Fest this weekend, with the second and final round of festivities running Saturday and Sunday. The event, which just wrapped its opening weekend, features food, live entertainment and cooking classes built around one very pungent star ingredient: garlic.
According to Arizona's Family, the festival marks its 13th year at the Queen Creek property, drawing crowds for a weekend built around food, live entertainment and cooking classes. This year's fest also comes with some fresh bragging rights: the 13th Annual Garlic Festival was named Best Festival in PHOENIX Magazine's 2026 Arizona Travel Awards, according to Eventbrite.
The festival features four garlic varieties, along with live cooking demonstrations from mill owner Perry Rea and specialized Garlic 101 classes for attendees who want to go beyond just eating the stuff.
Two Weekends Instead of One
Organizers split the 2026 Garlic Fest across two consecutive weekends, September 19-20 and September 26-27, per the same Eventbrite listing.
That popularity isn't new. The mill welcomes over 650,000 visitors annually, according to a 2023 report from the Olive Oil Times. That kind of traffic didn't happen by accident, and it traces back to a modest beginning two decades ago.
Queen Creek Olive Mill
Queen Creek Olive Mill is Arizona's only working olive mill.
The festival also features estate-grown garlic.
Suburban Growth Presses In
New development is moving into Queen Creek.
That growth has arrived close to home. In October 2025, homebuilder KB Home acquired a 115-acre parcel adjacent to Queen Creek Olive Mill to build Olea Groves, a 500-home master-planned community with pedestrian access to the farm, as Hoodline previously reported. The Real Deal also covered the acquisition at the time.
Queen Creek's agritainment zoning category allows uses including restaurants and venue spaces.
Freshness Built Into the Process
Behind the festival atmosphere is a tightly run production operation. The mill processes harvested olives within five hours and stores the resulting oil in 22,000-liter stainless steel tanks under a nitrogen blanket at 68 degrees Fahrenheit until bottling, according to Phoenix New Times. That same commitment to freshness extends to the estate-grown garlic featured at this weekend's festival, sourced directly from the property rather than trucked in.
The mill's olive oil has also found its way onto plates well beyond Queen Creek. A new high-end Valley restaurant, Il Bracco, incorporates extra-virgin olive oil sourced from Queen Creek Olive Mill into its menu, Hoodline reported earlier this year, a sign of the estate's reach across the region's culinary scene even as its own backyard fills in with new rooftops.
