Foodie Floats at the 2014 Rose Parade

I started my year with a trip to the Rose Parade, where I was treated to a few foodie-inspired floats in addition to a host of other wonderful floats, marching bands and entries. To get a snapshot of the whole parade, you can check out the gallery that I posted at Travels with Nic & Rob, but here I’m focusing on the food! The Trader Joe’s float had a cheese and appetizer theme, complete with a little pickle car that followed behind the main float. I noted that their float was decorated with vegetables like yellow bell peppers, in addition to flowers.

The float was enormous and it was also very animated – from the workers cutting the cheese to the helicopter made from a cocktail olive that circled over the whole platter – so the still pictures really don’t do it justice. Fortunately, I was able to take a quick video that shows just how much fun the float was in person.

The Rotary Club also had a foodie-minded float, and this one was very, very sweet. It featured a gingerbread train decked out with gumdrop hubcaps, peppermint stick railroad tracks and cupcake smoke stacks.  It was perfect for the end of the holiday season, even though I’m a big enough fan of gingerbread to eat it all year round. It was a good thing that this float was towards the end of the parade, because just seeing it made me very hungry – even though I knew that all those goodies were made with flowers!

The Rose Parade is, of course, known more for its flowers than for its food, and as much as I love flowers, it was nice to see a little food sneak its way in to the parade. I wonder if Trader Joe’s put together any party platters for watching the parade on TV featuring the snacks that were on its float? If not, maybe they’ll do something food related again next year and get another chance.