'Super Bowl of food' returns with newfound fortune for reigning champion

Novice chefs, gourmet cooks and trained culinary veterans alike are once again assembling for the Super Bowl of food.

Billed as the "world's largest food sport competition," the World Food Championships event shifts to Indianapolis, Indiana, this year after spending the past five years in Dallas, Texas.

Begun in 2012, the World Food Championships is a five-day event that attracts more than 300 competitive cooking teams from around the world to compete in 12 categories.

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"We just felt like there needed to be a Super Bowl of food," founder Mike McCloud told Fox News Digital in a Zoom interview from his hotel room in Indianapolis. (See the video at the top of this article.)

Unlike the Super Bowl, which decides the NFL champion, the winners in their respective categories at the World Food Championships earn $10,000 and advance to the final table in March for a chance to take home the $150,000 grand prize.

That was the case for Bethany Boedicker, the last cook standing at the final table earlier this year in Bentonville, Arkansas.

The two-time dessert champion is back competing in the World Food Championships, seeking to reclaim her crown and make it a three-peat in her category.

"Run the table as long as you can, right?" Boedicker told Fox News Digital.

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Using the purse money that she won from the last World Food Championships, Boedicker quit her job and pursued her dream of opening her own bakery in Galveston, Texas, where she lives with her husband and three children.

For Boedicker, it was the difference between dipping into her 401k early or taking out a small business loan.

"It's pretty awesome that I'm able to just invest in myself using that money," she said. 

Boedicker is looking forward to opening her Milk and Honey Baking Co. early next year.

"I am a Christian, and the Israelites were always trying to get to the land of milk and honey because it was the promised land, right?" she said. "And, so, this is my promised land." 

McCloud sought to create a food competition akin to "American Idol" when he cooked up the idea for the World Food Championships almost 15 years ago.

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But first, McCloud and his team needed to establish criteria for judging various cuisines against each other. 

"And we called that the END methodology, which was execution, appearance and taste," McCloud told Fox News Digital. 

"We felt like every dish, no matter what genre it came from, could be judged in those three criteria. And so we came up with a great scoring digital system that took five judges' scores from those three dimensions and equated to a perfect 100 score for dishes."

Much like "American Idol," which pairs famous musicians with amateurs, the World Food Championships bring together chefs from all walks of life and culinary backgrounds.

"That was one of the beautiful things about our ideation around this — that we didn't want it to be just a high-end, chef-centric competition," McCloud said. 

Part of the appeal of the World Food Championships, McCloud believes, is accessibility.

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"If you were great at dessert or great at bacon or great at burgers, and you wanted to come prove that you were the best, you had a chance to do that through our signature dish series," McCloud said. 

"And then you had a chance to prove that you're a good cook as well. Because we would throw a structured dish at you and say, 'All right, that's a great classic hamburger, but now you've got to make a patty melt,' and everybody's got to make a patty melt."

The inaugural World Food Championships took place in Las Vegas and spent three years there before moving to Orange Beach, Alabama, in 2015. It relocated to Dallas in 2019, was canceled in 2020 amid the COVID-19 pandemic and resumed in 2021.

Dallas had its final serving of the World Food Championships last year.

Indianapolis marks its fourth home since 2012.

"As we embrace the food sport mantra, Indianapolis made a lot of sense because of its sporting legacy and history," McCloud said.

Indiana's state capital is probably better known for its NASCAR race and sports teams like the NFL's Colts, NBA's Pacers and WNBA's Fever than it is for food, but McCloud said Indianapolis has "a growing and fantastic food scene."

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"You could eat out every night here for 100 days and have a three-star, four-star meal without ever repeating the location," he said. 

"So, it's underappreciated on the food side and well-respected on the sporting side. And that's why it makes a great host city for World Food Championships."

Indianapolis is home for now and, given the event's rotational history, seems poised to return as the host city next year.

"We always look at a move as a two-part strategy," McCloud said. "One, if it's ideal and we have a phenomenal response and the community embraces it, we like to think long-term. We would love to ultimately find our home, at least for the American championship of the World Food Championships."

But those behind the scenes at the World Food Championships have their eyes toward the future.

"There's just wonderful food cities throughout America and around the globe," McCloud said. "And we're constantly talking to other cities because we could end up developing a country qualifier or a regional qualifier strategy."

Mike Eaton is chief executive officer of World Food Championships Holdings, a new entity created about a year-and-a-half ago. He's part of an investment group that purchased a controlling interest in the World Food Championships.

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Eaton referred to it as the "'American Idol' for food" and said his charge is "to elevate the event, make it bigger or make it more consumer friendly."

He said a development deal is in the works to get the World Food Championships on television in 2025.

"But the long-term plan is to make this a very global and visible culinary food sport property and really position ourselves as the sanctioning body for all food sport globally," Eaton said.