What National Quesadilla Day is
National Quesadilla Day is an unofficial food-marketing observance with no legal or governmental status. Nothing about it appears in federal law, and banks, government offices, and the postal service run on their ordinary schedule on September 25 regardless of the day's name.
In practice, the day works the way most food-brand observances on this calendar do: a single company puts a date behind a dish, restaurant chains and grocery brands pick it up for a week of social posts and discounts, and calendar-aggregator sites like National Day Calendar and Checkiday list it alongside hundreds of similar days. What sets this one apart from most of its neighbors is not the quesadilla itself but how well the paper trail behind the launch holds up: a real company, a real press cycle, and a same-day television segment, all still checkable years later.
A 2019 launch that the founding company's website now dates wrong
V&V Supremo Foods, Inc. created National Quesadilla Day to promote its Chihuahua brand Quesadilla Cheese, and the first observance ran on September 25, 2019, not 2020. ABC7 Chicago's Windy City Live covered it that same day, describing it on air as the launch of "the first-ever National Quesadilla Day," with Gilberto Villaseñor II, one of the company's second-generation owners, appearing to make chorizo-and-poblano quesadillas. V&V Supremo sent a branded food truck to three locations around downtown Chicago that day to give away free samples, and the trade publication Dairy Foods reported the company's plans on September 13, 2019, ahead of the date itself.
V&V Supremo's website today tells a different story. Its current blog post about the day states plainly, "In 2020, V&V Supremo® proclaimed that every September 25th would be National Quesadilla Day," a full year after its own 2019 press coverage and live local-news appearance. The date the day falls on, September 25, has never been in dispute; the year the company itself says it started the tradition has quietly drifted a year later on its own site than the contemporaneous record supports.
A promotion within Hispanic Heritage Month
V&V Supremo promoted its September 25 launch alongside the opening weeks of National Hispanic Heritage Month, which runs September 15 through October 15 under federal law, and Villaseñor's ABC7 appearance framed the quesadilla giveaway as helping "kick off" the month rather than as a standalone food promotion. September 25 lands ten days into that month-long window and nine days after Mexican Independence Day on September 16, placing this newer food promotion in the same September 15–October 15 window as those other Mexican-themed observances.
That placement also lines it up with a donation campaign alongside the cheese promotion. According to Checkiday's account of the launch, V&V Supremo pledged to donate $1 to Chicago's United Neighborhood Organization for every photo of a Chihuahua-cheese quesadilla shared on social media tagged with the company and the hashtag #NationalQuesadillaDay, tying the marketing push to a local civic group active in the same Hispanic Heritage Month calendar.
Unusually well documented, next to its calendar neighbors
Most food days on this calendar have murkier origins than they look. National Coffee Day uses September 29, but the references examined for that guide identify no statute, proclamation or founding organizer for that date. National Guacamole Day, observed on September 16, the independence anniversary itself, has no founder traced to it either, with restaurant promotions and social posts illustrating its use rather than proving who chose the date.
National Quesadilla Day breaks that pattern. There is a company willing to put its name on the record, an executive who appeared on camera the day it launched, and a local news segment that is still online years later, a stronger founding trail than the unverified coffee and guacamole records compared here. The one place the record gets muddy is not whether it happened, but which year the company itself now says it happened.
That does not make it official. The brand’s proclamation does not make September 25 a US federal holiday, and the observance survives on the same mix of chain-restaurant deals and social media hashtags that keeps most of this calendar's brand-created days alive year to year.
Who V&V Supremo is
V&V Supremo Foods, Inc. is not a food-marketing agency or a national chain; it is a family-owned Mexican dairy and meat producer based in Chicago. Gilberto Villaseñor Sr. and Ignacio Villaseñor started the company in 1964 with $500, making Mexican-style farmer's cheese for Chicago's Mexican immigrant community. Six decades later, in an August 2024 anniversary release, the company described itself as one of the oldest continuously family-owned businesses of its kind in the United States, still run by the founders' sons: Gilberto Villaseñor II, the Chief Visionary Officer quoted in the 2019 launch coverage, and his brother Philip Villaseñor, the company's Chief Integrator.
That family-business framing matters for reading the origin story correctly. The record names V&V Supremo as the founding company; it does not establish whether any outside advertising agency helped prepare the promotion. The launch came in 2019, 55 years into the business, and the ABC7 segment presented it alongside the family’s Hispanic Heritage Month promotion.
How the day is marked today
Other chains also use the date: Chipotle’s official 2026 offer terms document a September 24–25 digital promotion. The Taco Day guide describes Taco Bell’s separate October campaign. National Today's 2026 page for the day, last updated in June 2026, frames its restaurant-deals section as a forecast rather than a report: it tells readers to "expect" a Chipotle discount and says Taco Bell "might" run special pricing, without linking to an announcement in that account. The later Chipotle terms establish a real promotion: at participating US and Canadian restaurants, one quesadilla entrée free with a $20 qualifying digital purchase and code NQD2026 on September 24–25, excluding taxes, tips and fees. That expired offer should not be presented as still available. Calendar-aggregator sites still list Chipotle, Qdoba, and Moe's Southwest Grill as brands associated with the day, but the sourcing behind those associations is thinner than the sourcing behind V&V Supremo's founding role.
Other accounts describe smaller forms of participation: home cooks and Mexican restaurants posting quesadilla photos with the #NationalQuesadillaDay hashtag V&V Supremo created in 2019, and calendar sites republishing the September 25 date from each other. Unlike a federally recognized month like Hispanic Heritage Month, nothing compels any business to participate, and most years the day passes with far less commercial notice than its neighbors on the calendar.