Festival headcount

[erandolph]

Good morning my brethern.

Have been doing private catering events for a while. A few customers are chamber of commerce members and have since asked me to take a booth at a few street fairs/festivals that they put on.

Because they know a lot about chambering and zero about catering I wanted to ask historcially what is an ideal % of customers from total spectators.

For example one event gets 18,000 spectators per day. of that how many could I expect to see. Just want to make sure I have the food supplies sort of figured out.

much appreciated

[cynfulsmokersbbq]

I did an event last summer that was a week long and saw 18,000 a day. We are a smaller scaled operation, (20 foot trailer) I served with maxed out smokers and maxed out help. We had 600-700 a day.

[teej]

Figure out many you can serve in a day. You can only serve as much as man power and other resources will allow. Start with that number and adjust accordingly.

[JS-TX]

I notice at festivals here in S. TX, that most vendors will keep things simple, not a whole lot of sides being offered. I see a lot of turkey legs, sausage on a stick/sausage tacos, bbq sandwiches etc.. Is that the same for you guys?

[Bbq Bubba]

Figure 5% of a crowd you can expect to vend to.

[HBMTN]

I agree with Bubba but if that is the size you are looking to vend be sure you have a lot of help you will need it.

[PorkQPine]

One of my clients in my real job had a rib restaurant and was excited that he got into a very large festival in town, probably over 100,000 people a day so he rented a reefer trailer and filled it with ribs to handle the crowd. Everything would have worked out except that it rained the whole weekend and he lost everything including the restaurant. Everything has a cost/reward matrix you need to think about. The long meats like brisket and pulled pork are the riskiest because they take so long to cook you can't cut back quickly if things don't sell as fast as anticipated, also the cost to be at the event may be huge. Some fairs charge 25% of the receipts plus the cost of the space and power. You may want to start out cooking smaller amounts of the long meats and have a secondary menu of chicken just in case, since chicken cooks quickly and can make up for being out of the other meats.

[Signature'sSmokeHouse]

This is a subject that I always find funny in the vending business. It doesn't matter if there is going to be 500 or 50,000 people at a said event. The answer to the amount of people that you can serve is the amount of people that you can serve in a said amount of time. How many meals per hour can you serve? and how many hours will you be there? I always here people that are just getting into this industry say "We are going to vend at an event with 100,000 people"... Who cares... You will still serve the same amount of meals... Just my thoughts that is all...

[HBMTN]

This is a subject that I always find funny in the vending business. It doesn't matter if there is going to be 500 or 50,000 people at a said event. The answer to the amount of people that you can serve is the amount of people that you can serve in a said amount of time. How many meals per hour can you serve? and how many hours will you be there? I always here people that are just getting into this industry say "We are going to vend at an event with 100,000 people"... Who cares... You will still serve the same amount of meals... Just my thoughts that is all...


Your thoughts would be correct to find the maximum you can serve and it would have no effect on how many people are at a festival. I think when people ask these kinds of questions it is so that A) they can put a game plan in place to be able to maximize sales or B) to see if the event will justify enough sales to participate. I do find your thoughts interesting as to find out what my maximum sales per hour based on my current set up would be.

[Bbq Bubba]

This is a subject that I always find funny in the vending business. It doesn't matter if there is going to be 500 or 50,000 people at a said event. The answer to the amount of people that you can serve is the amount of people that you can serve in a said amount of time. How many meals per hour can you serve? and how many hours will you be there? I always here people that are just getting into this industry say "We are going to vend at an event with 100,000 people"... Who cares... You will still serve the same amount of meals... Just my thoughts that is all...

Not necessarily true.

It is important to know how many meals you can turn in a given amount of time but that has no bearing on figuring out how many your actually going to serve.
Estimated crowd, last years attendance, how many vendors, location, are all things to consider when figuring out how many you may actually sell to.

[PorkQPine]

I read somewhere that you take the number expected divided by the number of food vendors and then cut that number in half to get an estimate of how many will come to your place. Perhaps someone will post what their experience is in vending. I don't vend, I like to get all my money up front and know exactly how many I am cooking for but I have thought about vending from time to time, but vending is a specialty where you can get hurt bad very quickly.