The 2020 World Food Championships’ (WFC) Final Table: Indy competition is taking place this weekend, Aug. 7-9, and Hamilton County’s own Meredith McVicker is a key player in bringing the Indiana culinary scene to the world stage.
Final Table: Indy is the culmination of the world’s largest food sport event, WFC, which crowned 10 category champions in Dallas, Texas, last October. The champions, three of whom are Hoosiers, will now bring their talents to Indy for three rounds of competition to determine who will take home this year’s “World Food Champion” title and a $100,000 prize.
Dickerson
McVicker
Meredith McVicker is the Chair of Corporate Outreach for Team Indiana and Culinary Crossroads. She and Culinary Crossroads Director Larry Dickerson were kind enough to talk with The Reporter about how Indianapolis playing host to this year’s Final Table is significant to both Hamilton County and the entire state.
It should be noted that both McVicker and Dickerson prefer to be referred to as “chief bottle washers.”
Produced as a docu-series TV show, the results of the first two rounds of competition will be shared with the public through the WFC social media channels on Facebook and Instagram.
“When it gets down to three people in the final round, those results will be only known when the reality TV show airs on the Cooking Channel at the end of September,” Dickerson told The Reporter.
It has been a long road to get this WFC event to come to Indiana.
“We started last year by supporting Team Indiana,” Diskerson said. “A big part of that was working with Meredith McVicker, my partner here who helped to promote it. I travelled to New Orleans where the Final Table event was held in May of last year. At that time, they had not decided where the next Final Table would take place. We knew we were going to go to Dallas with our team and we knew the Lt. Governor was going to go with us as one of the supporters for Culinary Crossroads. I walked out of there and it was one of those moments when the lightbulb comes on. I just knew we had to make a pitch to be able to announce at Dallas that it was coming to Indianapolis.”
With support from Ivy Tech Culinary Center, Visit Indy, Sysco, Lt. Governor Suzanne Crouch and others, Dickerson’s pitch was a success.
When Dickerson asked McVicker to help promote the event, she said her interest ran deep.
“The reason I am so interested is because my company works with many of the companies you would recognize in pharma, healthcare and the insurance industries all around Hamilton County and Indiana,” McVicker said. “We bring in the top 2 to 5 percent of candidates across the world to help them decide to come to Indiana to work and one of the questions they usually ask is, ‘What is the culinary landscape like in Indiana?’ People have no frame of reference. This became a great launchpad to be able to allow them to understand in a cohesive way of the entirety of Culinary Crossroads.”
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According to McVicker, one of the main goals is to let people understand what the culinary scene is like in Indiana and that the Crossroads of America is a premiere culinary destination.
“Right now, the trend has been for a lot of people to work from home,” McVicker said. “What we have found is that people are now deciding to fly in and out of places to have meetings. Being able to help them understand Indiana is a culinary destination is something that will be promoted more through the Culinary Crossroads initiative in the future, long after this wonderful and world-renowned event takes place.”
Dickerson said there are four pillars that define the Indiana culinary landscape: The people, products, places and services.
“We believe those pillars lead people to want to come here to live, work and play,” Dickerson said. “When we get those folks to come and take great jobs in the Indianapolis area, Hamilton County is there with a wonderful lifestyle where people want to live and take advantage of all the community has to offer.”
When announcing Indy as the host city last October, WFC CEO Mike McCloud stated, “We are really excited to be partnering with such a great culinary destination. Indianapolis has always been a great supporter of Food Sport, and we simply cannot wait for our champions to see what creative culinary challenges await them in this incredible city during the Final Table competition.”
One of the things the benefits to hosting Final Table is that Culinary Crossroads was able to put an Indiana focus on it.
“In the first round they will be working with Indiana pork products sourced from Fischer Farms,” Dickerson said. “We work with a local restaurateur, Carlos Salazar, a top-notch chef who run Rook. He came up with recipe guidelines. They will have to use the pork and match it up with Parisian gnocchi and infuse Red Gold Tomato products. So you can see that we are highlighting the people a products associated with Indiana.”
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, organizers had to move the championship from May to August.
“We hope that by doing so and by following all the guideline we are an example of a road to recovery and a road to moving on,” Dickerson said. “There are things that have to be changed and there are guidelines that have to be followed, but if you follow those and put them in place, you can have these events that are good for our communities. We feel very proud about shepherding through this so people can see that you can do this within the guidelines and be successful. The number one priority for us is for people to be safe and stay healthy while having a ton of fun.”
McVicker wanted to note that in her opinion she would like to point out how “phenomenally well” both Larry Dickerson and Mike McCloud from World Food Championships have addressed the challenges of putting on such an event during the pandemic.
“They are doing everything to follow exactly the COVID-19 guidelines,” McVicker said. “This is important because people are hungry to have something that is actually going on. This is definitely something that does a great deal to highlight Indiana in food sports.”
To learn more about WFC’s Final Table: Indy, please visit teamindiana.org or email information@teamindiana.org.