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.

Why are Food Truck menu prices so high at festivals?

Dear David, Why are food truck menu prices higher at festivals than for catering or at lunch stops?

Good question! 

Everybody complains about how expensive food is at fairs and festivals and most assume that it is the food vendors making a killing at the expense of the "captive audience" attendees.  Well, one of the dirty little secrets about festivals is how much many organizers/promoters charge those food vendors to take part.  Up to a point, it is understandable. T, they have a lot of expenses in securing the venue, marketing, security etc., but some situations become usurious.  

Ready for a little food truck festival economics?

Permits & Licenses
First, let's talk about permits.  Every state is unique, but there are more similarities than differences.  I'm in Arizona. Most Arizona cities and towns require their own business licenses.  Every Arizona County has its own "Environmental Services" (Health) Department and they each require their own permits and, usually, inspections.  That means that if in January a food truck was working a festival in Goodyear AZ, they would need a Goodyear City business license ($75) AND a Maricopa County mobile food service permit ($600). If next month that same truck did an event in Havasu City, it would need a Havasu City Business License ($110), AND a Mohave County temporary food vendor permit ($95).  Next month, Flagstaff? $8 business license, Coconino County Food Service permit $390.  Some of these fees are good for a full year but if you only do one festival a year in a particular city or county a year, you can see how all these fees add up quickly on a per-event basis!

Vending Space Then you need to pay for vending at each event.  It is common for the "space charge" for a 10'x20' food truck/trailer slot at a good festival to be around $300 per day (some are closer to $100/day but many are $500+/day).  At $300 per day space charge, a truck that expects to run a 15% net profit would need to sell over 285 $7 sandwiches a day to break even and not LOSE money.

Percentage Rakes
Some events also charge food vendors a percent of sales (SALES, not profits) of as much as 25%, often on top of a space charge. Few food trucks maintain a 25% profit (exceptions being kettle corn, hot dog, or novelty ice cream vendors).  If you're losing 10% on every sale, you can't just make it up on high volume, so you need to raise menu prices accordingly. In fact, even if the truck from above raised the price of that $7 sandwich to $9 for the festival they would still have to sell 375 of them a day to break even!

Utilities
To put out awesome freshly made hot meals, most food trucks need to have water, propane, and electricity to run their cooking and refrigeration equipment and clean their wares. Lots of us can be fully self- contained but not for an unlimited time period. Generators require frequent fueling, propane tanks need to be refilled, there's only so far you can stretch 40 gallons of water, and let's not forget about properly dumping the waste water either. 

All of this costs money, but festivals may require you to buy power, water and (for very extended events like state fairs) even waste water connections from the site.  It is not unusual to have to pay $100 to $300 for utility hook-ups at a 3-day event.

Beverages & Ice
Coke or Pepsi, or other large companies, sponsor many events.  Often, those events restrict beverage sales to ONLY products from those companies.  Tough but understandable.  

SOME of those events also require that food vendors purchase all beverages sold at the event directly from the sponsor at inflated prices than those available independently off-site.  They may further require that you buy all the branded cups, etc for service from them as well (again at a substantial mark-up).

So... You can see how there is a lot of upward price pressure, just to survive financially at these events.

David's Festival Rant

"Sustainability"
People love to talk about sustainability these days.  We ran our successful 100% off-grid goat cheese dairy for over 15 years and know a few things about sustainability.  One key component to sustainability that people forget to talk about is that if you work so hard and spend so much money being "green", or "organic", or "carbon neutral", or "sustainable" that you burn out and go broke… you weren't being sustainably at all, were you?  

The true measure of the sustainability of a business, whether a dairy or a food truck must be its ability to stay in the game long-term - to sustain the business - and that means paying your bills and making a profit.


And a Call to Action
We at Grillin N Chillin don't mind working hard (obviously!) and we don't mind paying a fair price for a spot at a festival, but do we mind supporting a rigged and unscrupulous system that shoves a never-ending parade of budding, unsuspecting would-be culinary entrepreneurs through the festival grinder with promises of 10s of thousands of hungry  attendees with unlimited cash, just waiting for their food truck to arrive.  We will not support such promoters, organizations or events with our time, money or food.  And we hope you won't either!

What's the dif? Comparing Broiling, Grilling, Griddling, Smoking, and BBQing.

At our food truck Grillin N Chillin we see a lot of folks coming by thinking we're a BBQ truck.  Or a grilled cheese truck.  Or something else that we're not.  Maybe it's my fault for picking an ambiguous name (but you gotta admit, it's catchy!). We're a grill truck serving char-grilled specialties from Chicken Teriyaki to Garlic Steak.

So... Let's try to cut through all the confusion right now and look at the differences between five very different, but often confused, cooking methods.  Broiling, vs Grilling, vs Griddling, vs Smoking, vs BBQing.

Yes there are some similarities between the methods and some crossover between the styles, but each is distinct and have unique attributes that make them special.

Let's start with Grilling (aka char-grilling). Think: high heat, short cooking time, on an open grate, over live flames. 

The heat source for grilling can be gas, although wood and charcoal are usually preferred. Wood chips and pellets may be used as well. Grilling is often thought of as a healthier cooking method as no fats are typically added, and many of those fats naturally present in the food, drains away.

"So, what about grilled cheese sandwiches?", I hear you ask.  Good question! Grilled cheese sandwiches are (obviously) not really "grilled". That would be impractical and incredibly messy.

"Grilled" cheese Sandwiches are generally pan-fried or Griddled (our second cooking method). A griddle is a heavy flat piece of metal, heated from below, usually by gas flames or electric elements, although a camp griddle might be set over hot coals too. The food cooked on a griddle is cooked in some kind of fat (that's what keeps it from sticking to the surface). Some people confuse grilling and griddling or use them interchangeably, but the results are totally different so, PLEASE, keep them straight! And (sorry!), I have no clue why they call them grilled cheese sandwiches.

  

Another cooking method that gets confused with Grilling is BBQ (aka bar-be-que, barbeque, and sometimes just Q. Method #3). This confusion comes from the fact that we mostly call our backyard grills "barbeques" and when we have friends over to cook burgers and dogs on the weekend, we call it "throwing a barbeque".

REAL BBQing is a low temperature, slow cooking method. And by slow, I mean REALLY slow.  6-12 hours for ribs, 12-18 hours for pork butts, and 24 hours or more for whole steers. Pit roasting and Spit roasting are, arguably other types of BBQing.

Now, Smoking (method four) is closely related to BBQ. It is also a low and slow method. Perfect smoking is accomplished with indirect heat and just the right amount of hardwood smoke enveloping the food. Ideal long-smoked foods have a pinkish color, despite being fully cooked, and will show a marvelous "smoke ring", the pride and joy of the pit master.

There are actually two different smoke methods, which are used for different results. Hot smoking is typical for ribs, brisket, pork butts, poultry etc. Cold smoking is used for pork bellies (bacon), smoked salmon, cheeses, and some types of ham. Cold smoked foods are still uncooked when they come out, but are deeply infused with smoke flavor.

One way to think about it is that some BBQ is also smoked (a pit roast pig might be one that is not), and some smoked foods are also BBQ (smoked salmon is not). But not all are both.

What about Broiling? (our last method to talk about today) Well, broiling is another high-heat, short-time cooking method, like grilling. In this case the heat is generally from electric elements, infrared, or gas flames, applied from the top. This is a great method for melting cheese on a gratin, or maybe flash-cooking fragile fish fillets, as it imparts no flavors of its own. That, of course, can also be the downside if you're looking for that unique outdoorsy flavor of grilling, smoking and BBQing.

So, now you know the important differences. Go cook up a storm!

Culinary Napalm

We have now completed our first major event with Grillin N Chillin: The Arizona Balloon Classic (ABC) in Goodyear AZ.

Grillin at ABC

It was a learning experience. We learned that event promoters lie. Sometimes a lot. Like about the number of attendees, about "curating” menus so there aren't multiple vendors selling the same thing, about the number of vendors they are booking, etc. All valuable lessons, to be sure, but the most important lesson we learned at ABC was about Culinary Napalm.

ABC turned out to be one of those events where you sit on your butts for 8 of the 10 hours they require you to be open for the three days in a row you have to be there.  And then get crazy-busy for, maybe, an hour at a time.

This time, the only real rush was on Saturday night when we had an order line 6 or 8 deep. And that's when I set the trailer on fire.

Because it had been so slow, I only had one of the three burners lit on the char-grill. I had my various squeeze bottles of oils and sauces on a sheet pan on the cold side of the grill. 

Little did I know, but at some point during the rush, I must have bumped the burner control knobs, turning them all to "high". My first clue was when I grabbed the teriyaki sauce squeeze bottle and the bottom dropped right out of it. Almost simultaneously, the caramel sauce, cooking oil, and BBQ sauce bottles all collapsed in a puddle, their contents gushing across the pan, over the sides, and down into the grill.

Within seconds, the sticky, volatile goo had ignited. I instantly flipped off all the burners, but the fire already had a head of its own. Flames were shooting two feet above the grill grates and getting perilously close to the fire suppression system components.

Kathryn, who was busy taking orders, didn't notice. I yelled to her (the food truck is noisy enough that yelling is pretty-much the norm) that "I had a situation". She glanced back, her eyes got a little wide, then turned back to taking orders. Later she told me, "Well, what could I do to help you? Might as well just keep working, right?" She had a good point.

The customers didn't even know there was anything wrong. They must have thought it was all part of the show. I mean, it's a char-grill truck and we sauté too. So, there are supposed to be flames, right??

So I did what I could to limit the fuel for the fire and worked to pull the drip pan out to try to douse the fire without resorting to the extinguisher. I'd pull the pan out a few inches, flop a wet towel on it and repeat. It was a moderately successful strategy (if arm and eyebrow hair are unimportant) and eventually the flames were out.

Then all I had to do was fully remove the drip pan, scrape the mass of charred, molten, culinary napalm-soaked towels into the trash. Nothing to it.

Crisis averted, I turned back to the order rack to find 12 new tickets waiting for me. Kathryn had been busy, and I was officially in the weeds.

When we got home, we designed and ordered a set of custom burner knob guards and bought a speed rack for my sauces. Problem solved.  Until the next one.

  

Concept & Design

Finished and installed.