Tastiest Cheeseburger in Central Minnesota: How Voting Works & How to Win

Five confirmed Septembers, one radio station, one cheeseburger

Mix 94.9, the on-air brand of KMXK, runs its own single-subject food vote at mix949.com: Tastiest Cheeseburger in Central Minnesota. The station's own page confirms five separate editions, 2021 through 2025, every one of them tied to September. That's an unusually well-documented run for a one-category radio poll; most food-vertical fan votes in this network show two or three confirmed years, not five.

The page's own copy sets the tone plainly: "Anytime is burger time, so let's all chime in and vote for Central Minnesota's best cheeseburger." The earliest archived version carries a byline from Pete Hanson, updated September 17, 2021, giving this program a named author trail that plenty of radio-station polls don't bother publishing.

What the page doesn't do, across five years of confirmed editions, is publish an exact day-level open or close date, a numbered category list, or a stated vote cap. This year's rules don't automatically match a prior one; confirm all three on the live ballot each cycle rather than guess from a prior cycle.

A single cheeseburger, not a bracket of restaurants

Nothing on mix949.com's page points to a bracket, a nominee roster, or a numbered list of qualifying restaurants. No category names turn up anywhere in the confirmed page text, which lines up with what the page's own copy reads like: an open, one-round tally for a single title, Central Minnesota's tastiest cheeseburger, rather than a multi-stage contest with separate divisions inside it.

The structure sets it apart from many food-vertical polls in this network, several of which run seeded brackets or separate categories for burgers, tacos, and barbecue side by side. This one stays narrow on purpose: one dish, one winner, one radio audience, and nothing else to track.

For a burger joint's owner, that narrow scope cuts a real question out of the planning process entirely. There's no separate "under $10" division or "specialty" bracket to guess at, and no risk of a strong burger landing next to an unrelated food category and losing exposure because of it. Every entrant, a drive-through classic or a sit-down bar's signature stack, competes on the same single tally.

Five years running, the same September window every time

Editions confirmed in 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, and 2025 all tie back to September, a genuinely consistent pattern for a program this size. That consistency is useful for planning purposes even though the exact open and close day for any single year isn't published: a restaurant owner can be confident the vote lands somewhere inside September, even without a locked calendar date yet for the current cycle.

Based on that five-year run, the program reads as a settled annual fixture for Mix 94.9 rather than a one-off promotion the station tried once and dropped. The next edition would reasonably be expected around September 2026, following that same pattern, though mix949.com hasn't published that date yet.

A five-year run is also long enough to rule out a one-time marketing stunt tied to a single promotion cycle. Mix 94.9 has kept the same address, mix949.com, and roughly the same September timing across all five confirmed editions, which is the kind of consistency a restaurant can actually build a repeat campaign around, year after year, instead of guessing whether the station will bother running it again.

Minnesota runs plenty of 'best-of' ballots; this one is a different animal

Minnesota has no shortage of multi-category readers-choice programs. Minnesota's Best stretches across the whole state, and Best of the Midwest covers an even wider regional footprint, each juggling dozens of separate award slots at once. Tastiest Cheeseburger in Central Minnesota isn't trying to be either of those; it's one station, one dish, one regional audience.

CommunityVotes Duluth and CommunityVotes Rochester follow that same broad, many-category pattern under a different national platform entirely, and Best of the Best Brainerd Lakes Area and Best of the Best (Duluth News Tribune) add two more newspaper-run versions of that same broad format. A burger joint weighing whether it belongs on any of those instead of Mix 94.9's poll is really asking a different question: whether it wants a shot at one specific radio-station title, or a spot among dozens of categories on a much larger community ballot.

What a Central Minnesota burger spot can actually plan around

Five confirmed years of the same September window is stronger footing than most single-category radio polls get, so the practical move for a restaurant is to start lining up regulars now rather than waiting for mix949.com to post an exact date. The station's own line, inviting the audience to "chime in," suggests a casual, high-participation format rather than a formal nomination process with paperwork attached.

No vote cap shows up anywhere across five confirmed editions, which is a real gap a restaurant shouldn't paper over with a promise of endless voting; the September window and the single-dish format are the two things actually worth building a pitch around. Is buying votes legal lays out what actually counts as a violation here, independent of how sparse this particular station's published terms turn out to be. A single-round, one-title format like this one also fits fan poll vote support more naturally than a bracket-style plan built for a multi-stage tournament.

Mix 94.9's own site also runs unrelated promotions on the same pages, an e-bike sweepstakes and an Ireland trip vote among them, that have nothing to do with the cheeseburger poll despite sharing a homepage. Until mix949.com actually posts a result for the current cycle, "in the running" is the honest description of a restaurant's status, not "winner."

The station's identity is independently confirmed as well: KMXK is a licensed Minnesota radio station, with Mix 94.9 as its on-air brand, the same pairing used throughout this guide. That's a small but real anchor point for a business owner who wants to check the vote is actually run by a real broadcaster rather than an unaffiliated listing site borrowing a familiar name.