KLIMON and Tacotarian announced on April 17, 2026 a partnership bringing 100% plant-based food and dairy-free frozen desserts to the Sick New World festival in Las Vegas. KLIMON’s Churro Chata Dairy-Free Ice Cream Sandwich is featured at the Tacotarian festival booth alongside Tacotarian’s full menu. The announcement does not specify the festival dates beyond its April 2026 timing in Las Vegas.
Tacotarian was founded in 2018 in Las Vegas, operates six locations, and has launched a retail line. It was named one of Nation’s Restaurant News’ 2025 Hot Concepts and ranked among Fast Casual’s Top 100 Movers and Shakers. Regina Simmons is Co-Owner of Tacotarian.
KLIMON is described as a dairy-free dessert brand producing 100% plant-based, Non-GMO Project Verified retail pints, scoopable tubs, soft serve, and novelty frozen desserts, with gluten-free and allergen-friendly options. KLIMON won the 2026 FABI (Food and Beverage Innovation) Favorite Award from the National Restaurant Association for its Churro Chata Dairy-Free Ice Cream Sandwich. KLIMON has brand partnerships with Minions, Cinnabon, and Kikkoman. Alex Cotraviwat is CEO of KLIMON. The brand is available at retailers nationwide and based in the Los Angeles area (424 area code).
The Festival Menu and the Churro Chata Ice Cream Sandwich
The Tacotarian booth at Sick New World is serving the brand’s plant-based Mexican street food lineup: pastor, asada, and birria tacos alongside nachos, birria ramen, and signature tacos elote. Every item on the menu is 100% plant-based, maintaining Tacotarian’s full vegan positioning at the festival format.
The dessert anchor is KLIMON’s Churro Chata Dairy-Free Ice Cream Sandwich: horchata-flavored dairy-free ice cream pressed between two soft, chewy cookies, with a flavor profile built around cinnamon churro and horchata. The product won the 2026 FABI Favorite Award, which is given by the National Restaurant Association Show and represents recognition from a foodservice industry peer-review process. That award is the sourcing anchor of KLIMON’s credibility claim as the announcement’s primary product.
The pairing of Tacotarian’s Mexican-inspired street food and KLIMON’s Churro Chata flavor profile is deliberately coherent: cinnamon and horchata are flavors native to the Mexican food tradition that Tacotarian’s menu represents. The dessert does not require explanation alongside the food it follows. For festival attendees eating pastor or birria tacos, a cinnamon and horchata ice cream sandwich is a culturally continuous closing course rather than a category-crossing novelty.
The Sick New World Festival Context and Why It Matters
Sick New World is a Las Vegas alternative and hard rock music festival that draws a predominantly younger adult demographic with high disposable income and strong event-based food and beverage spending behavior. The festival format provides a high-density, high-dwell-time audience that cannot easily leave the venue between set times, creating a captive food and beverage revenue window across the event’s duration.
For plant-based brands, festival activations serve a different commercial function from retail placement or restaurant operations. Festival attendance is self-selected by interest in the event rather than by dietary preference. That means KLIMON and Tacotarian are reaching a broad general population of alternative music fans, including a significant proportion who do not identify as vegan or dairy-free but who will try the product because it is the available option at the booth and because the product is positioned on taste rather than on dietary restriction. The Churro Chata ice cream sandwich does not require a consumer to be vegan to want it. It requires a consumer to want a cold, indulgent dessert at an outdoor festival in Las Vegas.
This is the commercial logic behind KLIMON’s broader partnership strategy. Its collaborations with Minions, Cinnabon, and Kikkoman are all designed to reach consumers who follow those brands’ audiences rather than seeking out dairy-free products specifically. The Tacotarian partnership at Sick New World follows the same pattern: reach a large non-self-selected audience through a culturally relevant venue and let product quality convert trial into awareness and repeat purchase.
KLIMON’s Product Architecture: Multi-Format Dairy-Free for Operators and Retail
The announcement describes KLIMON’s product portfolio across retail pints, scoopable tubs, soft serve, novelty frozen desserts, and formats that support “beverages and plated desserts.” This multi-format capability is commercially significant because it means KLIMON can serve as a dairy-free frozen ingredient supplier to foodservice operators as well as a consumer-facing retail brand.
The scoopable tub and soft serve formats are foodservice-facing products. A scoopable tub provides a dairy-free ice cream base for plating and portioning applications in restaurants, at event booths, and in foodservice contexts where the finished product is assembled on-site rather than served in a pre-portioned retail package. The soft serve format requires soft-serve dispensing equipment and is suited to high-volume foodservice environments like festival booths, quick-serve dessert counters, and entertainment venues.
For food and beverage operators evaluating dairy-free dessert programs, KLIMON’s multi-format availability means a single supplier relationship can cover both the retail placement in a grab-and-go cooler and the scoopable or soft-serve component of a sit-down or counter-service dessert menu. That breadth of format capability is a differentiator in the dairy-free frozen dessert ingredient market, where most suppliers serve either retail or foodservice but not both at scale.
The Non-GMO Project Verified and allergen-friendly credentials also extend KLIMON’s reach into institutional foodservice and healthcare dining environments where non-dairy, non-GMO, and allergen-managed options are increasingly required rather than merely preferred.
Why It Matters for Plant-Based and Dairy-Free Ingredient Suppliers
The Tacotarian and KLIMON partnership at Sick New World is a live demonstration of the plant-based festival food segment’s maturation from niche vegan booth to full-service, high-quality food and dessert program targeting general audiences. Tacotarian’s six-location growth, Nation’s Restaurant News Hot Concepts recognition, and retail line launch confirm that the brand is no longer a novelty concept but a commercially validated plant-based restaurant operator with multi-channel distribution. KLIMON’s FABI award, multi-format product architecture, and brand partnerships with Minions, Cinnabon, and Kikkoman confirm that the brand is positioned as a mainstream dairy-free ingredient supplier rather than a specialty health food brand. Their collaboration at a major music festival attended by a general rock and alternative music audience is the most public expression yet of both brands’ intent to compete in mainstream food occasions rather than plant-based niche spaces.
KLIMON’s horchata-flavored base and cookie components require a plant-based frozen dessert formulation that delivers dairy-like creaminess from a non-dairy fat and protein system without sacrificing the textural integrity needed for an ice cream sandwich format at outdoor festival holding temperatures. Non-dairy frozen desserts face a technical challenge that dairy-based products do not: the fats and proteins that create a creamy, scoop-stable frozen texture in dairy ice cream must be replicated using plant-derived alternatives such as coconut cream, oat base, cashew cream, or other plant fat systems. The ice cream sandwich format adds a further specification requirement: the frozen center must remain stable enough to hold its shape between the cookie layers without melting too quickly in a Las Vegas outdoor event environment. For plant-based fat suppliers, oat and nut base manufacturers, and specialty food texture system providers working in the dairy-free frozen dessert category, KLIMON’s award-winning Churro Chata formulation represents a successful execution of that technical challenge at commercial scale.
Tacotarian’s full plant-based menu at the festival, covering proteins such as pastor, asada, and birria, requires a complete suite of plant-based protein and flavor system inputs that replicate traditional Mexican street food textures and flavor profiles without any animal-derived ingredients. Plant-based birria requires a protein base that can deliver the collagen-rich, shredded texture of traditional beef birria broth without gelatin or animal fat. Plant-based pastor and asada require protein inputs with the charred, savory flavor notes that traditional al pastor and carne asada achieve through pork and beef fat rendering. For plant-based protein manufacturers, food-grade flavor houses, and specialty plant-based ingredient suppliers working with Mexican-inspired restaurant concepts, Tacotarian’s validated menu at scale across six Las Vegas locations and a major festival booth is a current commercial reference for the ingredient specifications required to deliver authentic Mexican street food flavor from a fully plant-based input system.
Other News
While agile, event-driven pop-ups like the Tacotarian and Klimon collaboration are essential for capturing the high-energy, plant-based festival demographic, the broader push toward highly curated, lifestyle-driven hospitality is simultaneously transforming permanent brick-and-mortar development. Proving that experiential dining isn’t limited to alternative music festivals, legacy operators on the opposite end of the culinary spectrum are building massive, multi-concept venues designed specifically to capture the premium, luxury consumer. Highlighting this trend toward ultra-niche, physical real estate expansion, a major hospitality group recently announced the development of a sprawling new complex in Pittsburgh featuring Juniper Grill, Atria’s, and the exclusive 1930 Cigar Bar. For restaurant investors and foodservice strategists, comparing these two wildly different approaches demonstrates the core rule of 2026 expansion: whether you are selling vegan tacos in a festival tent or premium steaks and cigars in a historic district, long-term success requires an absolute, unapologetic commitment to a highly specific consumer lifestyle.
FAQs
What is the Tacotarian and KLIMON partnership? A food and dessert collaboration at the Sick New World festival in Las Vegas, announced April 17, 2026. KLIMON’s Churro Chata Dairy-Free Ice Cream Sandwich is featured at the Tacotarian festival booth alongside Tacotarian’s full plant-based Mexican street food menu.
What is the Churro Chata Dairy-Free Ice Cream Sandwich? KLIMON’s signature product: horchata-flavored dairy-free ice cream pressed between two soft, chewy cookies with a cinnamon churro and horchata flavor profile. Winner of the 2026 FABI Favorite Award from the National Restaurant Association.
What food is Tacotarian serving at the festival? Pastor, asada, and birria tacos, nachos, birria ramen, and tacos elote. All items are 100% plant-based.
Who is KLIMON? A plant-based dairy-free frozen dessert brand producing Non-GMO Project Verified retail pints, scoopable tubs, soft serve, and novelty frozen desserts. Available at retailers nationwide. Brand partners include Minions, Cinnabon, and Kikkoman.
Who is Tacotarian? A plant-based Mexican street food restaurant brand founded in 2018 in Las Vegas with six locations and a retail line. Named one of Nation’s Restaurant News’ 2025 Hot Concepts and among Fast Casual’s Top 100 Movers and Shakers.
About Source86
The Tacotarian and KLIMON partnership at Sick New World reflects the plant-based foodservice and retail segment’s growing demand for plant-based protein inputs for Mexican street food formats including pastor, asada, and birria texture and flavor systems, non-dairy frozen dessert bases using plant-derived fat and protein systems for creaminess and scoop stability at foodservice holding temperatures, horchata-style flavor systems and cinnamon compound inputs for culturally inspired dairy-free frozen applications, allergen-friendly and Non-GMO Project Verified ingredient inputs across scoopable, soft serve, novelty, and retail pint frozen formats, and plant-based foodservice ingredient systems capable of delivering authentic ethnic cuisine flavor profiles without any animal-derived components. At Source86, we connect plant-based food manufacturers, dairy-free frozen dessert producers, and restaurant operators with trusted bulk and wholesale sourcing partners for plant-based protein systems, non-dairy fat and cream bases, specialty flavor compounds for cultural cuisine applications, and allergen-managed ingredient systems that power plant-based restaurant menus and dairy-free frozen dessert programs across foodservice and retail channels.
Whether your production team sources plant-based protein inputs for a Mexican street food application, non-dairy fat systems for a frozen dessert creaminess target, or specialty flavor compounds for a culturally inspired dairy-free frozen format, Source86 is your bridge to the right manufacturing and supply chain partners. Contact Source86 today to start your sourcing search.
