The Great British Toastie has seen us well through 2012, but this year, the third year of the Jabberwocky, we are considering refining our offering. There are a few reasons for this, all currently in a jumbled mess inside my head, so with the aid of tea, your good selves and several special guest appearances from the letter “k”, which is currently on the blink, I will attempt to explain.
To master Street Food I thin you have to pick one food and do it well, brilliantly even, so that you can become known for your speciality, and there is no dilution in the quality. We have staked our claim on the toastie. This year our plan is to turn toasties into something we can make a living out of, with the goal of supporting ourselves and eventually even a family. This involves making money, that involves getting the price right.
The basic equation is that we sell toasties to make money. The more toasties we sell, the more money we make. Sell them at a higher price and fewer people will buy them, but we make more profit per unit. Sell them for too little and we will probably sell more, but people will assume that they are cheap and nasty.
Basic economics out of the way, we have to find the sweet spot, and that will vary depending on the menu, the location, the alternatives available, the clientèle and the menu we offer. Our plan is to make our menu more appealing by offering more expensive toasties, in the hope that we can take home more at the end of the event.
It sounds delightfully straightforward. But before you all rush out to buy your toastie vans (or in the case of one recent festival goer, lecture us on why our food is too expensive) I’d lie to explain our problem with the expensive toastie: It probably won’t sell. Certainly not in the same volume as the normal ones. It will possibly also be an absolute arse to prepare, and left overs will be very costly to throw away. Instead, consider the gourmet alternative.
If we can turn toasties into something of an art form, and get all gastronomic on the humble toasted sandwich, then we can serve something that you know and understand, but simply couldn’t prepare at home: No one has flavoured butters and three different breads and an interesting fresh herb and a few artisan cheeses just kicking around the kitchen waiting to be toasted, but we do. I hope that will be the appeal; from my experience the attraction of street food doesn’t seem to be that you have never tried it, but that you have tried it, lots, but just couldn’t get it like that anywhere else.
It’s also about the name. Toasties are humble comfort food, and in terms of price, although they cost almost as much as a gourmet hamburger to buy, we can’t charge anything close to the £5-£7 of the average hand made patty and bun. But if we prefix our creation with a couple of descriptive adjectives that do our product justice, then hopefully people will understand that it’s worth the extra and be willing to try one, expecting quality rather than stodge. And we can be one step closer the Maserati, 50ft yacht, enormous mansion and expensive shoe collection that will be our inevitable reward for all this hard work.
If people buy into the hotdogs with champagne, free-range fried chicken and 50 shades of gourmet burger, your toasties will do just fine…