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33rd Billings Strawberry Festival
July 13, 2024 @ 9:00 am - 4:00 pm
Presented by Downtown Billings and Visit Billings: The annual Strawberry Festival is Billings largest vendor street festival. This long-time cherished community event kicks off the summer event season in the heart of our City’s urban center. You’ll experience a rich diversity in arts and crafts, the scents of food-truck fare (from French Crepes, noodle bowls, to BBQ), and live street entertainment as over 100 merchants fill the streets of downtown Billings. The Strawberry festival draws a crowd from all over the northwest region to Downtown Billings (under Skypoint at 2nd Ave N. and N. Broadway) offering fun activities for all ages.
Click for Digital Festival Map
Event resources
Live entertainment will happen under Skypoint at N. Broadway and 2nd Ave N
- 10:00 am – Montana Fiddle Club
- 11:00 am – Dancers from Greater Heights School of Dance
- 1:00 pm – Dancers from Studio 38
Do you want to perform under Skypoint at the October 12th HarvestFest or the 2025 Strawberry Festival? Click here to apply!
Our events wouldn’t be possible without the help of awesome volunteers like you. We appreciate all the extra help we can get, whether it’s assistance during the 5:30am vendor arrival/check-in or helping at the Skypoint info booth. All volunteers are provided with food and beverage voucher, bottled water, and any items needed to perform position.
Click to sign up to volunteer or email lexiem@downtownbillings.com if you are interested in helping.
In the 2024 Strawberry Festival there are over 80 vendors who will have strawberry products, menu items, offerings. Those vendors are noted on the vendor list linked here with a 
next to their vendor number.
A little history on the festival.
When the Strawberry festival began in the 1990s, it began as an early June event that kicked off the downtown Summer event season and consisted of less than 40 vendors. Despite its name, the Strawberry Festival is and has always been a vendor street fair bursting with commercial merchants, arts and craft vendors, and food vendors and not a farmers market. Over the decades the DBA team tried various ways to incorporate the festival’s namesake into the event: For nearly twenty years the late Ziggy Ziegler, a founder of the Downtown Billings Association (DBA), wandered the festival in a large rubber strawberry costume and a group of chefs and cooks worked with Albertsons to craft a sixty-foot strawberry shortcake on-site to later sell by the slice as a fundraiser. The Strawberry man costume was retired from the festival when Ziegler himself retired in 2019 and the giant shortcake became an item of the past when the festival returned in July post COVID in 2021.
After 28 years of coordinating the early June festival, our hard working team and regular vendors grew tired of the inconsistent June weather literally raining or even snowing on our efforts and the day’s fun. When the festival returned in July 2021, after a one year COVID hiatus, we sought board approval to permanently relocate the festival to July. The new early July date has offered more consistent weather, larger crowds, more vendors, and allowed the Strawberry Festival and HarvestFest to bookend the Yellowstone Valley Farmers Market Season. With the one real downside of the new date being that by early July, we’ve sort of missed the prime ‘Strawberry Season’ and haven’t had much luck in our efforts to bring in fresh pallets of strawberries to the Strawberry festival since. However, unlike huckleberry or sugar beets, strawberries are not a common Montana crop and having strawberries at the Strawberry Festival has proven itself a challenge for years prior to the new date.
And before you ask, “why not change the name if it’s not a festival loaded with strawberries?”: A proposal to change the name of the festival was presented to our boards, membership, and the festival vendors in and the majority preferred we keep the name of this legacy event the same. And so…The Strawberry Festival is an Arts & Craft, Merchant, and Food Truck Festival where nearly 1/2 of the vendors (that’s 80 vendors in 2024) in the festival have some sort of strawberry themed product or strawberry offering… You can find are strawberry scented hand crafted candles, strawberry themed hand sewn items, clothing, and even doll clothes. There’s pottery, jewelry, and more all with strawberries in mind. A full list of vendors including those with strawberry offerings will be made available at the purple info booth at Skypoint during the event itself.
If you are interested in sponsoring the Strawberry Festival or any other downtown Billings event, please email our Communications Director, Lindsay at LRichardson@downtownbillings.com and she can share current sponsorship opportunities.
Our sponsors are amazing and we like to talk about them often. Their sponsorships allow us to cover the costs of our large free community events and allow us to make these events a success and memorable for the whole community.
All applications are closed for 2024 festival.
to register, click on the appropriate application:
Event Sponsors
This event is coordinated by Downtown Billings’ Business Improvement District (BID) and co-hosted by Visit Billings. Supported by signature sponsor Valley Credit Union and event sponsors TDS Fiber, MariMint, My Classic Hits 105.9, Planet 106.7, 98.1 KBEAR, 94.1 KSKY, ESPN 910, The Zone 96.3, and Wise Wonders Science & Discovery Museum.
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Volunteer
We’re always looking for good volunteers! If you’re interested in getting involved, contact our Event Director, or sign up for our Volunteer newsletter below: