Make Festivals Profitable for your Food Truck

Here are some important things that Food Truck entrepreneurs, especially new ones, should know about vending at events like fairs, rodeos. balloon fests, car shows, horse shows, trade shows, etc.

How to Find Shows

There are two main ways to find out about good events:

• Get to know somebody who knows something.
• Family, friends, neighbors all know about some events somewhere they'd love to tell you about.  Cousin Joe goes to a big gun show a couple of towns away, Sally from the PTA attends a Renaissance fair every year, and that goofy kid from across the street knows all the event promotors for ComicCon.  And (they will tell you) ALL of them would be GREAT places for you to take your food truck!
• Other food truckers, especially those who have been around a while, can be a great source for venue tips. I never miss the opportunity to ask every single one I meet, "What are your best events every year?".  Most will be happy to tell you and will often give you the contact info for the person running the food concessions, and tips on where the best spots/days/hours are for the event.
• Random strangers can be a surprising wealth of information.  The very best tip on an event was from a UPS driver.  He saw our trailer and said, "You know, you guys really need to check out Overland Expo.  You'd do really well there."  He was right, and now it's one of our best events.
• Roll-up-your-sleeves research.  Bless the Internet! With a few keystrokes you can find just about every event, small and large, happening anywhere you want to find one.  The problem is often more one of information overload than dearth.  You can comb the online sites of Chambers of Commerce, newspapers, travel zines, Tourism sites, etc. for happenings and events in their area of coverage. A better solution is to join one or more of the many event clearinghouse sites available.  Some are free, some are fee-based, some are a combination, but they all have robust search capabilities to help you screen for exactly the events you are seeking.  Here are some sites we've used to good return:
• https://festivalnet.com/
• https://www.fairsandfestivals.net/
• https://www.craftmasternews.com/
• https://www.myfairsandfestivals.com/

How to Vette Shows

The short answer is "You can't".  S**t happens, circumstances change, weather is unpredictable, and things are not always as they appear. That said, there are some things you can do to help make the very best booking decisions you can.

What do YOU need?

To properly vet an event you first need to know: 

What do I need to call this a successful event for us? 

Let's assume that paying the bills and making a nice profit by the end of the show are near the top of your list.  But there may be other, maybe even more important considerations for you like...

• Getting your name out.  Seeing and being seen, and self-promotion can be very important, especially for new operators or concepts.
• Winning a contest.  If there is a competition at the event and you want to have your truck's name on that trophy that alone may be good enough to get you to take part.
• Supporting a good cause. Maybe a charity event for a local good cause, or a fundraiser for the school football team? 
• Testing a new menu.
• Getting your foot in the door. Is this the first chance you've had to work with a big local events promoter who could, if all goes well, get you into lots of exciting events down the road?

Will this event fit my needs?

Now we get to the nitty-gritty.  Collect all the information about the event that you can find.  Understand that some of it will be more reliable than others. Get multiple sources to verify the most important pieces (like expected attendance, the number of other food vendors on site, etc.), if possible, and put pen to paper.

Realistically, this is a perfect job for a spreadsheet program.  We use an Excel template we developed just for vetting events.  We call it our Festival Evaluation Form. It covers everything from the direct event costs to travel expenses, to fixed and variable expenses based on our sales projections.  When used properly, it gives a clear projection of whether an event will be profitable.  BUT, as they say, "Garbage in, Garbage Out".  If the numbers we plug into it are flawed, so will be the results.

Here's one for an event we have coming up in a few weeks*...

(You probably noticed that I do not have any labor costs accounted for.  Here it will just be my wife and I working the event for the 3 days. We do not pull a regular hourly wage working the truck but get paid based on monthly profits.)

Other considerations and caveats

What works for another trucker might not work for you. Rave reviews from your buddy with the BBQ truck about how great a certain rodeo is ("My best event of the year!") might not hold true if you run a gluten-free cupcake truck.

• Beware of "1st Annual" events. With no track record to examine, anything you may hear about the event will be pure guesswork.  These events are big risks so, unless they are nearby, almost free to participate, and not competing with anything else on your schedule - it is wise to steer clear.
• That said, we did a 3-day "first annual" event within a few months of opening our truck for business. It turned out to be a redneck outlaw biker gathering held in a junkyard, in the middle of the desert, with monster trucks, wet Tee shirt contests, mud bog races, etc. Most of the other food vendors all cancelled at the last minute, so we jammed from 6am to 10pm all weekend long!  It's still one of the most lucrative gigs we've done. You just never know.
• Be suspicious if an event organizer contacts you to come vend, unless you are already a very well-known, popular truck.  As a rule, you must work very hard to get on the waiting list for the good events.
• Be suspicious if a long-running event has little or no repeat vendors.  The promoters may say that they like to keep the options changing, but the truth is more likely that they can't get vendors to return.  Try to find the real reason.
• Promoters lie.  Sometimes it just puffery, or wishful thinking but often it is intentional to get you to sign on to their event.  Once they have your money, they have very little at stake in your doing well.  Watch out for:
• Exaggerated attendance figures
• Stated number and type of other food vendors
• Promises of "curated" menus or non-competing other vendors
• Load-in/load-out specifics
• Provided amenities (garbage, power, water, etc.)
• Suspect electric power quality. More than once, organizers have promised they would supply us with power to meet our needs, only to find there was no power at all.  Or worse, the power being supplied was substandard to the point of being dangerous. One time they had set up the event generators to deliver 3-phase power, burning out many refrigerators and soda carbonation systems in the trucks who were hooked to them.  We now always use an in-line automated power sampling and surge-protective adapter whenever we connect to event power supplies.

* 7/20/2019 Addendum:

Besides the Festival Evaluation Forms, we also fill out a Festival After-Action Report when we get back from every event we do. We then compare it to our expectations from the Evaluation Form and learn many things.

For example, we learned that for the event highlighted above (Flagstaff in the Pines 2019), we TOTALLY BLEW IT! Yep, despite our best efforts, what looked like it should have been a good event turned out to be a DOG! We ended up with a gross profit of $373 after 3 long days of work instead of the $2325 we had forecast. OUCH!

So, what went wrong? A lot!

• Remember, I told you "Promoters lie"? Well, this one was a doozy.  They said to expect 15,000 attendees for this HUGE 4th of July celebration.  In actuality, only 5000 showed up over three days!  I usually cut the promoter's attendance expectations from 25% to 50% for forecasting, depending on what I find from other sources. Here, I found multiple sources that all said previous attendances had run from 15,000 to almost 20,000 people, so I stayed with it.
• Remember when I said, "Beware of "1st Annual" events"? Well, this wasn't exactly a "first annual" as they had held it at for least 8 previous years.  What I did not find in my research was that the most recent previous one was TEN years ago!  How did I miss that? So, this was practically a "first annual" event, again.
• I had also missed the fact that there were two other competing 4th of July celebrations happening in town at the same time.
• Remember when I said "S**t happens, circumstances change, weather is unpredictable"?  Well, the weather was gorgeous for the whole weekend but there ended up being a major accident, with fatalities which closed the freeway (that just about everybody used to access the event) for most of Saturday.

What can I say?  Sometimes the bear gets you.

The 4 Best Roads to Food Truck Profitably

Congrats! You have a food truck or trailer. You have a killer menu and some amazing food that you're eager to amaze the public with. You're a self-contained mobile restaurant! You're totally stocked-up and ready-to-go! But, go where?

In theory, you could set up for business anywhere you can drive to and park the rig. Right?

<sigh> If that were only true. Sorry but, this is the real world and not the movie "Chef". There are a lot of rules to follow if you want to keep food truckin’ and do it successfully.

"So, where DO I go to sell my food?"

Here are the basics. There are four main directions you can take with a food truck/trailer to find work…

1. Lunch Truck: Find a good place to park, fire up your grill/griddle/fryer, open your service window and sell to whoever comes to buy. There is great freedom and flexibility in this type of work, but also much risk until you cultivate a tried-and-true route or latch onto a few primo locations.
2. Food Truck Courts: These are dedicated sites where customers can find a number and variety of food trucks parked for meal service. They can be pop-ups or fixed locations and may have a constant rotation of different trucks vending or they may be more relatively fixed, like a food court at a mall.
3. Catering: Contract-based arrangements between hosts and food truckers for the trucks to provide specified food to a set number of guests for an agreed-upon price.
4. Festivals: Special events like fairs, rodeos, car shows, food truck rallies, etc. Organized by the staff of the organization holding the event or a third-party promoter these are limited-engagement events which may a few hours to several weeks long. Food truckers pay for a spot to set-up (or a percentage of sales, or both) in exchange for the opportunity to offer their foods to the attendees of the event.

Some Truckers find one revenue stream they like and stick with it. Some go after several, or even all, of these types of jobs. What works best, and is most profitable for you will depend on your location, the food truck culture in your area, your tolerance for travel, your menu, your staffing situation, and your own working style.

There are hybrid-type jobs too. For example, a company may want a food truck to come to their business and be available for lunch service with their regular menu to employees (Like a lunch truck) but are also willing to guarantee that the truck will do $XX in sales (so like catering as well). These can be sweet gigs to hook up with!

Regardless of the type of food truck you have or the style of food trucking you want to do, your success will largely come down to LOCATION. The beauty of mobile food businesses is that they are… MOBILE! You can go to where the customers are. If you can consistently find the right places to set up and sell, you are well on your way to success!

I'll be weighing in with more specifics and the pros and cons of each of these four work-type scenarios in future posts.