Somerville's Union Square is bracing for roughly 30,000 people this Saturday as the What the Fluff? Festival marks its 21st year of celebrating the neighborhood's sticky claim to fame: marshmallow creme. The free, all-ages event runs from 1 to 5 pm on Somerville Avenue and Bow Street between Church Street and Union Square, plus the Union Square municipal lot, with a rain date set for Sunday, September 20.
According to Axios, this year's theme is “Legally Fluff: A Toast to Union Square,” and organizer Jake Wilson credited local businesses, artists and volunteers with keeping the festival running for more than two decades. The event will feature more than 100 vendors selling fluff-themed food, art and merchandise, alongside two performance areas: the Shenanigans Stage and the Fluff'n Jam Stage.
The Shenanigans Stage will host the festival's signature games, including fluff musical chairs, fluff limbo and a fluff hairdo contest, per the same report. Over at the Fluff'n Jam Stage, festivalgoers can catch live sets from Magnificent Danger, Camelia Latin Dance Band, Solmaría and Dom the Composer. Beyond the stages, the festival notes it will also offer boardwalk-style games, a parkour course, robotics demonstrations at SomerNova's Innovation Alley, and a community mural led by artist Nate DeVarie.
Honoring the Neighborhood Behind the Jar
The festival exists to honor the local invention of marshmallow fluff, a product with roots that trace back to Somerville resident Archibald Query, who began selling his marshmallow spread door-to-door starting around 1917, the outlet reports. Query sold the recipe for just $500 in 1920, and the buyer, Durkee-Mower, built it into the iconic brand recognized today, according to the same account. Durkee-Mower's factory has long operated in Lynn, and the company's core formula — corn syrup, sugar syrup, dried egg whites and vanillin — has remained unchanged and free of artificial preservatives since that 1920 purchase, according to KPBS.
Despite manufacturing between 5 million and 7 million pounds of Fluff annually, with roughly half of that supply purchased by consumers in New England and upstate New York, Durkee-Mower keeps its distance from festival planning, as reported by Fox News. Company executive Jon Durkee said in 2014 that the family-owned business prefers to let the local community run the event independently, according to Mental Floss. The manufacturer does donate product for festival games and contests, but organizing has always stayed in local hands — a dynamic that traces back to the festival's founding by Mimi Graney, then executive director of Union Square Main Streets, who launched it to celebrate the invention while promoting local business revitalization in a neighborhood that needed it.
A Sandwich With Its Own Political History
The Fluffernutter sandwich, a Fluff-and-peanut-butter pairing whose name Durkee-Mower came up with in 1958, has generated more than sugar highs over the years. In 2006, Massachusetts State Senator Jarrett Barrios introduced legislation to limit schools from serving Fluffernutters to once a week, prompting State Representative Kathi-Anne Reinstein to counter-file a bill attempting to name it the official state sandwich, according to the Los Angeles Times. Neither bill ultimately passed. Fluff even made it off the planet: NASA astronaut Sunita Williams took it aboard the International Space Station in 2012, taking the regional food tradition into orbit.
Getting There and Getting Around
This year's festival will also recognize Angela Hsuan Chen for her multilingual outreach work on the Union Square Farmers Market's SNAP match program, and official festival gear was designed by Jen Gubicza, according to Axios's report. Getting to Union Square is easier than it once was: the MBTA opened the Green Line Extension's Union Square Station in March 2022.
Drivers should plan ahead. The festival area — Somerville Avenue, Bow Street and the Union Square municipal lot — will be closed to traffic Saturday from 10 am to 7 pm, with parking restrictions in effect from 9 am to 7 pm across the same footprint. Free bike valet service will be available at two locations along Somerville Avenue, and MBTA buses will detour for the day. Full details are available at flufffestival.com, and attendees can text FLUFF26 to 888777 for day-of alerts.
The festival's staying power over 21 years has coincided with a changing Union Square, where recent developments like First Crush's planned permanent wine bar for fall 2026, Kima Cafe, which was targeting a mid-September opening and a July lease signed by Workbar for a 10,000-square-foot facility reflect the same commercial district the festival was originally designed to help revitalize back in 2005.
