Meet the Pickle Power Couple behind the Pickle and International Food Festival.

This year pickle power couple Francesca Campbell and Dane Brennan teamed up with Crooked Run Fermentation, a Virginia-based alcohol company, to create the area’s very own pickle-themed festival. It was an instant hit for the good ’ol DMV.

The biannual Pickle and International Food Festival debuted in April 2026, and its second run is expected to attract over 10,000 attendees this October. The festival features over 100 vendors offering classics like fried pickles, but also pickle lemonade, pickle pizza, pickle beer and pickle fudge. Crooked Run provides the drinks, and over two dozen food cultures are represented. There's also live music, fall- and pickle-themed activities like a pumpkin patch, a pickle photo station and pickle coloring pages. What more could you want?

To Francesca and Dane though, it's about more than pickles. It’s about bringing people together. The festival provides a platform for small business and unites the diverse community of people in their area over a shared love of good food.

Francesca and Dane took a windy road to pickle-preneurship. Francesca was pursuing a career as a lawyer working on civil litigation and white-collar crime at the Department of Justice before a rare kind of digestive paralysis forced her to take a step back. Rather than travel to Europe to try experimental therapies not approved by the FDA, Francesca began a year-long holistic food journey, pickling everything she could — including soaking chicken in pickle brine — all in an attempt to restore her health.

On the other hand, Dane had owned a pizza shop in Boulder, Colorado, before losing a close friend to an overdose inspired him to become a substance abuse counselor. He met Francesca while working in Southern California on a program he started that helped patients get jobs or get in school. Following this career path, they moved from California to the DMV so he could attend a graduate program at Georgetown in higher education.

By the time he graduated, his dad asked him what he was going to do with his degree. His answer was every parent’s dream: to start a pickle company. Living with Francesca, Dane saw the impact healthy food could have, and he could use the company to provide jobs for high school and college students while purchasing from local farmers. Excited for a pickle-filled future, the couple filed the paperwork to incorporate Blue Ridge Pickling on a very romantic Valentine's Day in 2023.

Now they’re both full time picklers. It’s a lot more work than being a lawyer, Francesca warns. They use the recipes they spent years developing and are vendors at farmers markets. They brine pickles in glass to be microplastic-free and sweeten and flavor them with locally sourced vegetables and spices.

I met Francesca and Dane at a Tastemaker event for food creators, where I got to try some of their products, including Chesapeake (Old Bay) pickles, the classic dill and — my favorite — the garlic dill green beans. The pickled beans had a satisfying crunch that made them an instant classic for me. The pickle pair don’t make any claims that their food will cure your various ailments, but they are very good pickles.

If you attend the festival in October and see someone in a pickle costume drinking a little too much pickle beer, stop and say hi to me. I’ll be enjoying the festival in style.