For a long time we have been the only people we know selling toasties. I know there are others out there; we occasionally bump into them on our voyages to London to check out the resident street food scene, but due to the way most events are booked we rarely actually trade with them. It’s bad form to book two traders serving the same food at one event, as customers will probably only eat that food once over the weekend, so you are potentially halving their takings.
However at large festivals there will be several areas of food, and so naturally there will be a certain amount of overlap. Last weekend we were ensconced within the Global Gathering VIP area, and out in the main arena there was another tribe serving toasties.
With most street food you will find that in any given region you are not unique. If you chose pizzas, pancakes or mexican food you may actually find that you are one of fairly large number, and that will inevitably lead to a certain amount of gentle rivalry. Clearly, your product is best: we put lot of effort into our toasties and are really quite proud of the outcome. We’re only human, I think it’s natural.
So when someone else encroaches on your audience there are three ways to deal with that. The first is to ignore them completely, continue as if they do not exist and put them out of your mind. The second is to stride over, introduce yourself and then jovially discuss the hardships of toastie making. The third is to send your mates over to take pictures and buy product, so that no one is ever any the wiser.
We opted for the third strategy, when it became clear that saturday was going to be busy enough that taking half an hour out to meet and greet on the competition wasn’t really an option. Plus, from our limited experience of meeting other toastie people, which has so fair only ever been at larger festivals, they are not necesarily always up for gossip and swaps, especially if they are empoyees rather than owners, which is fairly common at these big events.
Our helpers went and bought some food: cheese and ham for added comparative ease, took some pictures and reported back.
As im not restaurant critic I don’t rip into other folks’ food. Regardles of what your product is made of, it has still taken considerable time, effort and money to get it here, to a festival. Not only that, but as a dedicated festival trader you are far more focused on the sharp end of the business, because you will be paying more in pitch fees and will have fewer events in total, but each one will be a giant make-or-break festival rather an a £30 market.
Really then, we can’t actually compare our food with theirs. They are making considerably more money off each unit sold (same price point, much cheaper ingredients) so in that respect they are easily doing better. Tasting the competition isn’t so much about reasuring myself that our food is better; it’s about seeing how other folks do it. They are going about the process in totally different way, and it looks like they’re doing alright.
Street food and festival catering work out very different sometimes, nowhere more clearly than here. While street food can wriggle its way into all sorts of places, the festival caterers like these don’t get that option. On the otherhand they will probably take away more profit from the weekend than we do, so aside from the product, you have to admire that.
That’s an interesting read.
I should probably put some context around my musings – I am half of Pit Smoked BBQ and if you were to ask us what we are, we would say festival caterers. Having said that, we have a street food mentality – we don’t compromise on the ingredients we use, we care passionately about the source of our ingredients and our ethos is simple – to change the perceptions of what customer’s expect from a catering trailer.
We are self funded, have grown organically and love getting real smoked BBQ food out to the masses. We would struggle, however, to justify the costs associated with street food in return for the revenue (I purposely ignore the word profit here!) we have built a model on which, at the right events we can absorb the costs of using the best ingredients, using traditional low and slow smoking methods and serve – en masse, the food we are proud to be known by.
I don’t think there needs to be a compromise between volume and quality, there needs to be a model that suits the event.
Keep up the great work.
Neil
[…] Last week’s post and a thought-provoking comment by a fellow caterer made me realise that when street food happens on the street it’s a rarity rather than a regularity. By any linguistic definition of the word, we shouldn’t be called street food vendors, and neither should most of our colleagues. […]