This is a guest post from Gordon Thomson, owner of police box coffee and Woodburns Street Food, a family run business that he founded after travelling the world with his wife and young family over twenty years ago. Now in partnership with his eldest daughter, they serve fresh, independent food at over 50 UK festivals each year.

Feeding thousands of people – who are often under the influence – over two to five days, is both a weighty responsibility and a delight to deliver.

The question for all of us involved in the festival food industry is what outcome do we want for food catering at our future festivals? If we can agree on that then we can move on to the next question, which is, how is that best achieved?

A food revolution

I have been involved in “street-food” since 1996.

An opportunity came up to obtain former police boxes in Edinburgh and having bummed around the world the previous year with my wife and then three very young children, spending time on the Hawaiian island of Kauaii and loving the quality espresso-based coffee served there, I thought the police box could be converted to an espresso, single estate, coffee kiosk.

But at the time, coffee caterers serving pre-manufactured instant coffee often with dried or long life milk ruled the roost.

So our Edinburgh kiosks, where we roasted our own single origin coffee, ground the beans in front of the public and served every type of espresso coffee using fresh milk, soya etc. was a revolution for Britain in 1996, at a time when Costa was a small outlet found at airports and Starbucks was four years away from coming to our shores.

Since these early days, we have added different street-food options to each kiosk. This ranges from hand-made wood-fired pizza to grilled cheese sandwiches.

In 2009 my daughter decided studying Maths at university wasn’t for her, and having saved some money from the Farmers Markets, handed it to me saying she was now my partner and we were going off to do street food at music festivals!

My definition of street food is taking raw, fresh, local ingredients and turning them into a food or drink on the premises and serving to the public.

It is the complete reverse of what we had been brought up with in Britain.

Food/drinks were prepared in some factory, filled with e-numbers, preservatives, fat and salt to keep them from degrading, to disguise their bland taste and give them long shelf lives. They would then be heated up or cooked from frozen on site.

Street-food is a revolution ideally suited to small, independent, often family businesses, many like ourselves who have travelled the world and who have specialised in one or more forms of street food they have encountered in their travels.

Nutritious, fresh food prepared in front of the customer, often derived from traditional peasant dishes that have fed ordinary folk for centuries without the need for pre-preparing in factories, and all the e- numbers and preservatives that go with that process.

It is a breath of fresh air, offering variety and accommodating minority tastes.

Since commencing catering at festivals in 2009, I have seen the demise of the juggernaut white catering trailer and the growth of street-food catering.

My own business has expanded from one vintage trailer called “Black Bettie” converted by our village blacksmith into a fire breathing wood-fired pizza wagon, to a second vintage trailer “Fanny Trollope,” and four further handmade canvas English Heritage tents.

We now cover fifty to sixty festivals a year of all different sizes.

I think we can all agree that street-food catering has hugely helped our festivals and it is something we wish to see thrive in our future. So how can that be done?

Variety is the spice of life (and festivals)

Firstly you can’t bake your cake and eat it! I understand the temptation to accept huge sums of money from High Street chains, to serve their product, not with a view to making a profit but simply to increase brand awareness.

Today it may simply be coffee and pizza, tomorrow burritos, crepes, burgers, you name it. Folk that attend festivals are a fickle bunch. We don’t want our catering to simply be an extension of the High Street.

There is a huge difference from our 1962 “Black Bettie”, village blacksmith converted, fire-breathing pizza trailer and a bland High Street brand!

Going down this path means the end of independent food, because we can’t compete with multi-national chains not seeking to make profit, and indeed who may make it a condition of their large fee to refuse to allow any competition in the first place!

Didn’t we just agree that independent street food units were to be encouraged? So stop it.

Shared risk, shared reward

Secondly, the white juggernaut caterers of the past may have been able to pay £9000 fees, due four months in advance, but we can’t.

To have professional, well-organised, efficient street-food catering family firms they need to be attending a lot of festivals. We know due to recent recessions that a lot of people have entered the catering world.

You are spoilt for choice, but without shutting the door to new and innovative products, you do need a hard core of experienced independent caterers capable of handling Health and Safety regulations, volume, deliveries, speed of service etc..

If we have to pay an average of say £3000 fee payable three months in advance, and seek to do fifty festivals, we need £150,000 capital shelled out before we start earning a penny! We are not Pizza Hut! You don’t want Pizza Hut. We need a better way.

The way in my view is a percentage of turnover fees, with relatively small down payments asked for in advance, enough to show commitment and the undertaking of some risk on the part of the caterer but not enough for the Festival to be OK if that is all they got.

Can we deliver enough turnover to make this attractive?

Well, of course, it is for the street-food festival catering community to come up with innovative processes whereby their hand-made produce can be served quickly enough to reach a tantalising turnover for your festival as well as our own business.

For example, our pizzas are baked in the wood-fired oven in under sixty seconds and the oven can take eight pizzas at any one time, with the customers’ ingredients added as they order. Try as I might I can’t serve as quickly as a burger van with pre-cooked from frozen burgers, throwing them on a roll. But that’s not really the point.

You will still get your money, as now there are more units offering much greater choice, but we must have a sensible fee structure, one that supports the Future of Independent Food at Festivals, not ensures it’s demise.

In other words, we are in it together, with shared risk and shared profit and that in itself will sort out getting the right mix of caterers and the right number and quality of caterers.

It also dictates the size of percentage taken from turnover. If you want 25% you need to deliver an environment of constant, full-on trading or expect higher prices which your punters may not thank you for.

Twenty percent often produces the best results. All of which takes me to my final point.

Realistic ratios are essential

Thirdly, we have to have the right number of caterers to punters and we need full disclosure.

At the large festivals, the festival organiser needs to know the food concession has the ability to say gross over £20,000, giving them a four to five thousand pound fee depending on percentage, and the caterer needs to know the ratios before contracting.

Of course with smaller numbers of staff at the smaller festivals, the gross income can be a third of that figure and we can still make a reasonable profit, but the fee is less and 20% is the absolute maximum that can be charged.

Working out the ratio of punters to food outlets is not an exact science. The National Catering Association publishes advice found on the web on to what should be taken into account should a caterer be seeking to tender for an event. I would suggest all festival organisers read it.

People coming to a music festival just for the day, where there is no camping, spend less than a three-day festival-goer who is camping. Dance festivals are notorious in the catering world, they just don’t eat, and ratios have to reflect this.

To go back to the large festival, if you want me to gross £20,000, averaging £6 a sale, then I need a minimum of 3000 sales. During a three-day festival, given the first day will be quiet and folk will have taken food with them, the ratio needs to be over 1200 to 1500 people per concession.

You wouldn’t be mad enough to start up a festival unless you were optimistic about numbers.

Unfortunately, reality might be half what you expect, and if you have catered for the optimistic figure, then the caterer takes it on the chin.

To help combat this, I would like to see more use of second intakes. I have six units, and don’t book them all out. I and others can supply a unit closer to the commencement of a festival if your ticket sales pan out according to your more optimistic expectations, and you feel you are under-catered for.

The UK Festival Awards, in their annual report publish guidelines on percentages of sales you might expect six months out, three months, two months etc. I would like to see second intakes of caterers, especially at the less established festivals, closer to the event date.

In summary

If all the above was implemented, we in the independent street-food catering world, like festival organisers, continue to take risk. Some festivals will flop, due to weather or whatever, and no “percentage fee” will compensate.

But then travelling on the roads carries risk too. Our vintage HY van that we had four years back was written off by a drunk who drove into the back of the trailer it was upon. My wife and daughter who were pulling her, were lucky to get away with whiplash injuries.

Risk is part of the business that we are all involved in. All we can do is reduce the risk in areas we can control, and if we do that then the future of independent food at festivals is an exciting one that will continue to thrive.