Big news. Really big exciting news. Really big really exciting news that would warrant capital letters if I were that way inclined. We have started a street food collective with some of our fellow outdoor chefs.
For the uninitiated, a street food collective is an informal gathering of like-minded folks who all want to make a living out of street food. We see opportunities for street food all the time, but most of them we can’t take because we’re already trading elsewhere. Now if there was a way for us to still benefit from these trading opportunities by helping other street food folks to get pitches it would be awesomely fortuitous. A market could happen, and when we do need to fill the diary there are more opportunities available for us to pitch up and sell. Everyone’s a winner.
So back towards the end of last year Barny and I got together with the Hungry Toad, Spectacular Goat, Big Daddies Diner and Meat Shack (who later had to switch to being our first members due to time issues). We argued about names for several weeks, trying to find the perfect word to sum up what we wanted to do: A passionate bid for independence; a struggle against the forces of darkness and a desire to make the world a better place with food. Hard to fit into a single word, and also sounds more like we’re trying to topple a corrupt regime than just make a few toasties, so we called ourselves Scoff.
Once we had a name sorted experience has taught us that it’s best to start looking for work straight away, while worrying about the fine tuning as we went along. Street food is littered with good intentions that were lost along the road of getting everything beautifully branded and sparklingly clean, so we started to talking to people.
This led to the discovery that there are a fair few people out there who want to support the industry, but who don’t know where to start. They have an idea for a market, or a piece of land, and don’t know where to go next. Individually all we could do is wait until they sort themselves out, hope that they didn’t go under and keep half an eye on the twitter feed. Now we’re actually in a position to help.
As a result of this I have spent the last two days wrestling with a brand new website, because as the person with greatest internet knowledge the honour of creation has fallen to me. It’s still a work in progress, but if you are interested in the future of the Scoff Street Food Collective then that is an excellent place to start.
It’s nice to finally be able to talk about a project that we have been working on for so long, knowing that we are now far enough down the line for progress to be weeks away rather than months. Hopefully this will be the start of something good; either way I will, of course, keep you posted.
folded?