The Jabberwocky is becoming a fairly substantial resource on starting a street food business. It turns out people really do want information on the topic: the book is selling at a rate substantially beyond my wildest dreams and folks are still asking questions. I love it. We need new traders with new ideas in the industry. But are there any original street food ideas left to try?
A lot of the time, when people get in touch they are delightfully secretive about their planned street food venture. I understand why: you have the BEST, most original and obviously most lucrative idea EVER. Naturally everyone you meet will want a slice of that. I don’t blame you for keeping it under wraps: street food is now almost commonplace. That means the number of viable new ideas is steadily decreasing and if you have one, you want to hold onto it.
The problem is that original ideas don’t necessarily sell. They will net you a certain amount of prestige with the bloggers and foodies who have been in from the start and seen it all, but the average consumer doesn’t try new food. A bold claim; bear with me. At an average market we sell 5-6 different toasties. One of those will be ham and cheese. This perennial classic will outsell everything else 2:1. At an average event “familiar” and “safe” food will always win out.
What can I say, it’s a classic.
When we first started doing gourmet toasties we were the only ones. It was a tough start, and that was a fairly mainstream, understandable foodstuff. So what of all you folks sitting on that amazing idea, reading this with a sinking heart? Please don’t give up. Unique ideas are what keep this industry alive. There is still a vast ocean of unexplored dishes and a boat-load of new cooking techniques. There will always be a few people new to the industry who identify a product that works (ooh – pizza! ooh – burgers! ooh – pulled pork!) and deliberately make themselves a copy of traders already out there. You don’t have to be one of them. You won’t even be missing out: the market for yet another pizza seller could well be smaller than you think, because no one will hire two pizza traders in the same market.
The people I admire are the ones who don’t go for the obvious choice, but have actually gone for an original idea. You were inspired by something unique, you have fallen in love with a concept and this is your baby. As long as what your cooking is awesome – which I’m sure it is – you will be the future award winners. You will get into the interesting events and you will be the one all the bloggers and foodies want to try.
To demonstrate the sheer volume of untapped opportunities out there, and in order to assist with the creation of many new and wonderful original street food ideas, I have painstakingly developed a rigorous scientific method for establishing YOUR perfect street food business.
That’s the what (you’re super welcome!) the how is up to you. For anyone playing along at home, here is a random dice roll. Please let me know your new original street food idea in the comments! Unless it’s a secret. Then I totally understand.
Finite Provender:
Proudly serving offal balls in fondue sauce since 2001.
We started with a simple dream- to turn our old garden shed into a mobile catering unit and sell unique food to the masses. One rusty chassis and a lot of heartbreak later, we achieved our goal and are the ONLY one of our type in the UK.
Hi Flic,
Just read your book and it was so so useful. We’ve ben trading for around 6 months now at smaller events and wish I’d read it earlier, so many useful tips, particulary trading out of a gazebo set up the advice of the ratchet staps and corkscrew pegs, a lifesaver at a recent windy event!
I wanted to ask your advice please about stall and pitch sizes for festival applications. We operate out of a 3mx3m gazebo and are looking at all our applications for next summer events and as we do bigger events we are anticipating having 2 3×3 gazebos , one at the front as our actual stall and one behind as a prep station. We would be looking for a pitch width of around 5m to take into account signage etc but are thinking about pitch depth, being 6m plus our van so around 10-12m. this sounds like a lot to me and I don’t want to put too much in case there isn’t space or is this a totally normal and reasonable amount of space to ask for? Any advice would be very much appreciated.
Paul
Paul