A Familiar Format At The Polo Grounds? Del Mar Wine + Food Festival’s Local Branding Collides With Florida Corporate Structure, Public Tourism Dollars, And Echoes Of An Existing Event

The Del Mar Wine + Food Festival bills itself as a grassroots celebration of San Diego’s culinary community, a culinary extravaganza “by locals, for locals.” But peel back the marketing and a very different story emerges. Behind the scenes is a format strikingly similar to San Diego’s longest-running food festival backed by a complex corporate ownership chain that traces to Florida and connects private equity investors, sports complex developers, celebrity capital, and San Diego public tourism dollars. The festival’s largest event is staged on land controlled by the same investors who own the festival itself, and one of its most visible ambassadors, an NFL legend, appears in corporate records as something more than just a friendly face.

San Diego already has a world-class food and wine festival. The San Diego Food + Wine Festival was founded in 2004 by Fast Forward Events, and it has been named the best wine festival in the country by USA Today for years. Its multi-day programming includes celebrity chefs, curated dinners, and a large-scale Grand Tasting taking place on the Embarcadero, with the downtown skyline, Coronado, and the glittering waters of San Diego Bay as backdrop. It has been taking place for more than twenty years. 

Then, in 2023, something familiar appeared in Del Mar. 

The Del Mar Wine + Food Festival's website describes an origin story of breathtaking simplicity: some locals sat around one day and decided to throw an outdoor cookout on beautiful grass, close enough to smell the surf, for a few thousand friends. The public record describes something more deliberate.

The festival's CEO and co-founder, Chris Finn, spent roughly a decade working for Fast Forward Events, the company that created and still produces the San Diego Food + Wine Festival. He left, built a competitor using a strikingly familiar template, and launched his own food festival in the period directly before his former employer's event. 

Chris Finn served at Fast Forward Events from approximately November 2014 through June 2021, first as Senior Account Manager, then as Associate Director of Sponsorship Development, then as Director of Sponsorship Development. According to his LinkedIn, over more than six years, he built and managed sponsorship relationships with some of the most recognizable names in food, beverage, and lifestyle branding all on behalf of the San Diego Food + Wine Festival. 

He learned the festival business from the inside of one of the country's most successful regional food events. He cultivated the sponsors. He managed the partnerships. He understood the format, the logistics, the audience, and the value proposition. 

Then he left and built nearly the same thing with the same format, the same multi-day structure, the same celebrity chef anchoring strategy, the same charity-as-marketing wrapper, the same lifestyle branding. Like many professionals who leave an industry role, Finn would have taken with him his experience and understanding of the festival business. Whether that translated into industry relationships or knowledge that helped shape the new event is not something publicly documented.

Marketing materials present the Del Mar festival as a homegrown collaboration among recognizable San Diego personalities. They prominently feature Troy Johnson, longtime San Diego Magazine food personality and frequent Food Network judge, as host and co-founder. His wife Claire Johnson, CEO of San Diego Magazine, is described as co-founder and emcee. Chris Finn and longtime San Diego entertainment executive Ernie Hahn are also promoted as founders of the event. All four names carry credibility in San Diego’s hospitality and entertainment circles.

Hahn spent decades helping run the San Diego Sports Arena and later launched experiential marketing ventures including Dream Hahn and Wonderbus Entertainment. He is also connected to other local event properties such as the Wonderfront music festival and now works in luxury real estate in Del Mar and Rancho Santa Fe.

The Hahn name itself has long history in San Diego development. Hahn’s grandfather, Ernest W. Hahn, was known as the "pioneer of the modern shopping mall". He founded The Hahn Company, which built many major shopping centers around the country and San Diego, including Fashion Valley, Parkway Plaza, and what eventually became Westfield UTC.

Local sports celebrities like Alex Morgan, Drew Brees, and Rob Machado are also marketed as "ambassadors" of the Del Mar Wine + Food Festival. Guy Fieri, whose son is a student at SDSU, headlined the most recent 2025 Grand Tasting. All of this reinforces the festival’s image as a locally rooted event. But the corporate paperwork tells a different story.

The actual legal ownership structure, documented in California Secretary of State filings, tells a different story. Notably, all of the people described in public marketing materials as founders do not appear on the publicly available California filings.

Del Mar Food and Wine, LLC is a Florida-formed LLC incorporated in May 2022, registered in California in February 2023. Its principal address of record is 446 W. Plant Street, Winter Garden, Florida. Not Del Mar. Not San Diego County. Not California. Central Florida. 

The managing member of Del Mar Food and Wine LLC? Another LLC: Pioneer Sports and Entertainment, LLC. Also formed in Florida with the same principal address in Winter Garden. Pioneer Sports & Entertainment has attracted significant scrutiny from San Diego residents over the removal of grant deed protections on the former Del Mar polo fields, where much of the Del Mar event is held, actions that paved the way for broader development of that land. 

And who controls Pioneer Sports and Entertainment LLC? Pioneer Capital Group LLC. Also formed in Florida with that same Winter Garden address. 

Peel back three layers of Florida Limited Liability Companies and you finally arrive at actual human beings. The listed managers and members of Pioneer Capital Group, LLC, the entity at the bottom of the ownership chain, are: 

• Christopher P. Miller with a listed address of 446 W. Plant Street, Winter Garden, Florida;
• Jeremy McDonald with a listed address of 2683 Via de la Valle, Suite G425, Del Mar, California; 
• Drew Brees - c/o IMG Center, with a listed address of 1360 9th Street, Suite 100, Cleveland, Ohio; and
• Mark Plunkett with a listed address of 6565 Hillcrest Avenue, Dallas, Texas.

Christopher Miller is effectively the invisible man of the Del Mar Wine + Food Festival. He is listed at the top of the ownership chain. It is his signature on the original California Secretary of State registration - yet he is promoted nowhere in the festival's public materials. Public records link him to several San Diego-area properties, including a reported $13 million residence in Rancho Santa Fe. 

Jeremy McDonald is the CEO of Pioneer Sports & Entertainment, a youth sports and events company his LinkedIn says he has led since 2012, although the website lists 2023 as when it was founded. Under his leadership, Pioneer acquired and expanded Surf Sports, the organization that operates the former Del Mar polo fields. McDonald is the registered agent for Del Mar Food and Wine, LLC in California. His Del Mar office address appears on the corporate filing. He is, operationally, the closest thing the festival has to a local San Diego executive. 

McDonald's résumé reads less like a culinary organizer and more like a corporate strategist. He holds an MBA from Emory University’s Goizueta Business School and completed additional training at Esade in Barcelona. According to his LinkedIn profile, he previously founded the technology company Saker Systems LLC and operates Press Cellars, a Napa Valley winery. 

Mark Plunkett is a Dallas-based private equity executive serving as Managing Partner and Chief Investment Officer of Dallas-based Hilltop Opportunity Partners, the merchant banking division of Hilltop Holdings. Hilltop Opportunity Partners is an investor in Pioneer Sports & Entertainment, tying the land, the festival venue, and the investment capital behind the project into a tightly linked structure.

Plunkett also co-founded a hedge fund seeded by Blackstone and Bridger Management, previously worked at The Carlyle Group, Hicks Muse Tate & Furst, and Cardinal Investment Company, and began his career as a McKinsey analyst. He holds an undergraduate degree from Southern Methodist University, where he graduated magna cum laude as a Fulbright Scholar, and an MBA from Harvard Business School, where he was class co-president. He is not merely a San Diego food enthusiast who decided to throw a party. He is a sophisticated private equity investor who sits on the board of Pioneer Sports & Entertainment and has identified this venture as worth his capital. 

Then there is the festival’s most recognizable name in the ownership structure. Drew Brees. The former New Orleans Saints Super Bowl-winning quarterback is publicly described by the festival as a celebrity “ambassador.” Corporate documents suggest a deeper financial connection through Pioneer Capital Group. Brees has expanded aggressively into business ventures since retiring from the NFL. As of early 2026 he has reportedly joined a group exploring a bid to purchase the San Diego Padres, a deal that could value the team between $2.3 and $3 billion.

His public image has undergone its own evolution. In 2020, during the nationwide protests following the police killing of George Floyd, Brees ignited backlash across the sports world after stating he would “never agree with anybody disrespecting the flag,” comments widely interpreted as criticism of the national anthem protests initiated by Colin Kaepernick. Similar sentiments had also surfaced from former San Diego Magazine owner Jim Fitzpatrick, whose social media posts criticizing the protests triggered their own controversy in San Diego and ultimately led to a public apology and the deletion of his Twitter account during a turbulent period for the publication.

“We don’t have a million-dollar marketing budget. We’re scrappy,” said San Diego Magazine's current owner Troy Johnson in a San Diego Union-Tribune interview about Del Mar Wine & Food Festival. “We’re a few San Diegans who just believe in this and work our butts off to get it done. We didn’t have the capacity to do 24 events, so let’s do nine events this year and focus on them and make them special and amazing.”

Here is where San Diego taxpayers have a legitimate stake in the conversation.

The festival’s own website states that Del Mar Wine and Food Festival, LLC “is funded in part by the San Diego Tourism Marketing District Corporation with City of San Diego Tourism Marketing District assessment funds.” According to the San Diego Tourism Marketing District’s FY2025 Report of Activities, the event requested $74,500 in tourism funding and was ultimately approved for $64,715, according to the FY2025 Annual Performance Report.

The same report projected the festival would generate approximately 2,300 hotel room nights at an average daily rate of $289. For an event whose audience appears heavily local and regional, that projection raises questions about how those estimates were calculated and how realistic they may be. The central question — whether those visitors represent new tourism to San Diego or simply diners diverted from existing events — has not been publicly addressed.

Tourism district funding itself is not unusual. Many festivals and cultural events receive support through the San Diego Tourism Marketing District, including the long-established San Diego Food + Wine Festival. The policy question is whether a newer event competing directly with an established culinary festival should receive similar public backing when the measurable tourism impact appears dramatically different.

According to SDTMD reporting, the Del Mar Wine + Food Festival received approximately $64,715 in tourism funding in a recent year and generated an estimated 761 hotel room nights, producing roughly $231,831 in room-night revenue and a reported return on investment of about 3.6-to-1. By comparison, the San Diego Food + Wine Festival received a slightly smaller allocation — about $61,026 — but generated nearly 9,948 hotel room nights and roughly $2.56 million in room-night revenue, producing a return of approximately 42-to-1.

The contrast raises an obvious policy question: why are two events targeting a similar luxury food-tourism audience receiving comparable public funding when their reported tourism impact differs so dramatically?

In a city with a finite pool of tourism marketing dollars, using public funds to subsidize a competing event built on a similar format to an existing, established festival is a legitimate question for policymakers and taxpayers alike. SanDiegoVille reached out to the San Diego Tourism Marketing District for comment and received the following:

San Diego Tourism Marketing District grants are awarded based on available funds, an applicant’s ability to generate hotel room stays and an emphasis on events that occur during periods of lower hotel occupancy in the City of San Diego.

Both events took place in the fall, one month apart, during times when hotels in the district typically have more availability.

The SDTMD board seeks to support new and promising events to help them get established when funding allows. Such events are expected to need additional marketing support while they grow attendance and the return on investment. This was the case for the Del Mar Food and Wine Festival which only launched in 2023, whereas the San Diego Bay Wine and Food Festival launched in 2004.

Because overnight hotel stays at SDTMD hotels are the primary metric for calculating the return on grant investments, the district provides event organizers with support from Real World Academics, a consulting team that helps them develop as measurable an approach as possible to track and validate their hotel room bookings.

The charitable component of the festival is another central piece of its public messaging.

Promotional materials highlight a partnership with Feeding San Diego, a respected regional hunger-relief organization. The festival states that “a portion of proceeds” supports the nonprofit’s work rescuing surplus food and distributing it to residents facing food insecurity.

The exact percentage of proceeds donated has not been publicly disclosed. A San Diego Union-Tribune report cited in prior coverage stated that the event had raised more than $75,000 for Feeding San Diego prior to the 2025 festival.

While that contribution represents meaningful support for the nonprofit, it also highlights the scale of the event itself. Tickets to the festival’s Grand Tasting have reached as high as $465 for VIP admission, while individual dinners and culinary events often range from $200 to $400 per person across multiple days of programming.

The festival’s website prominently promotes its charitable partnership with language inviting guests to “join the cause.” Yet with revenue figures for the event undisclosed, it is difficult to determine what percentage of overall proceeds ultimately reach the nonprofit.

Festival co-founder Troy Johnson recently said on a podcast that the event has raised “over $100,000” for Feeding San Diego since its launch. In the same interview, Johnson referenced a separate fundraising dinner at Callie restaurant in San Diego’s East Village that generated roughly $500,000 for the charity in a single night.

Without greater financial transparency, the charitable component functions largely as a promotional element of the festival’s marketing rather than a clearly measurable share of its revenue.

San Diego has room for multiple food festivals, but transparency matters. Why is a Florida-formed LLC with an out-of-state ownership trail marketed so heavily as a local San Diego creation? Why did a festival built by a former Fast Forward executive appear with such a familiar blueprint, then schedule itself just ahead of the city’s legacy food-and-wine festival? Why don’t the promoted founders and public faces of the event appear on the California corporate filings? Why should public tourism money give more money to a newer competitor event whose own reported returns appear far weaker than the long-running festival it resembles? And when “a portion of proceeds” goes to charity, what portion are we actually talking about?

These are not fringe questions. They are the basic questions San Diegans should ask whenever glossy local branding collides with opaque ownership, public money, and a suspiciously familiar business model.

The Del Mar Wine + Food Festival may want to be seen as an aspirational celebration of local culinary culture. But from where this looks, it reads less like an organic civic institution and more like a highly structured commercial enterprise build on borrowed format, borrowed credibility, public subsidy, celebrity gloss, influencer amplification, and a carefully staged local identity covering a much more corporate core.

None of this makes the festival illegitimate. It does not even make it unusual. But it does make the entire enterprise look far less like a grassroots celebration and far more like a familiar playbook: replicate a proven festival model, wrap it in local branding, secure public tourism funding, and let the money flow through a corporate structure few attendees will ever see.

Research for this article was based on California Secretary of State public filings, San Diego Tourism Marketing District reports, LinkedIn professional profiles, and public reporting from the San Diego Union-Tribune, Times of San Diego, and San Diego Reader. We reached out to listed Del Mar Wine + Food Festival email contacts several times asking for comment and clarification but never received a response.

Originally published on March 10, 2026.