Vending
 

I am planning on Vending the Cleveland Apple Festival this year in October and am trying to plan out how much food I will need to cook for the people. They said there was 7500-10000 people there last year. I am not sure that I believe that number. I have heard that you can plan on feeding 10% of the crowd. The menu we have planned is BBQ sandwiches, Slaw, French Fries to drink we are going to do sweet tea and lemonade along with some specialty strawberry lemonade. I am thinking we will do 5 oz sandwiches. What do you all think? How much slaw and french fries should we need? I plan to use the catering calculator for the meat and then adding a couple of butts to give us a little extra. We are also going to have the smoker on site spitting out that sweet blue smoke to draw them in. This will be my first vending attempt and I want it to go as smoothly as possible.

Find out how many food vendors are there, how many are doing barbecue, how many are doing fries? Base your sales and menu on that first.

8 primary food vendors and 12 secondary food vendors. They don't have all the vendor spots filled. According to the website they will only allow 2 vendors to sell the same items.

HOw many days is the festival? is it a one day event? 10% seems to be overkill. If it is your first event dont expect it to go smoothly, but it will serve as a basis for next year... taking along the smoker is the best idea...

Vending is an educated gamble. After a couple years you will get the hang on what you need. If you dont have another place to get rid of the food you dont sell it even becomes a bigger gamble. Most vendors fail if they are not busy enough and try and make a home run or vend twice a year. There is no doubt you will either sell out and or have way too much food left over carrying crazy costs with you. There is no exact science to vending I dont care what anyone says. It is all educated guess's. If you run out of food you fail, if you end the event with nowhere else to sell you will fail. What kind of signage do you have to make people what to come to you? There are a lot of factors. Do you want to gross 2k or 15k? There is a lot to think about beside how much food to bring. Are you truly set up to VEND!

Its a 2 day festival. 10-6 on Saturday and 1-6 on sunday. I don't have anywhere to get rid of the extra food after the festival. I would like to net 3-4 k. I figure my cost on 500 sandwiches with fries including the fee will be around 800.00. The plan is too cook enough for what we think we will need for both days and then if we somehow sell enough on Saturday to fire up the cooker and cook some more for Sunday. I am not set up to vend I really just want to get my feet wet and see if this is something I want to pursue.

Blogbeta did you mean 10% is too much to pay or too much to think I will be able to feed that many? The only cost to vend is the 220 fee for the festival.

thanks for all the input!

With an experienced crew you can do about $1500 an hour if you are busy and if you have the right ticketed priced items.

Jacked up how many people would you expect to attend a festival that you were selling 1500 an hours worth of product at?

I bet you can feed that many, the thing is the other vendors... Jacked up summed it up perfectly, It is pure gamble... Just get the price right and the line moving.... Good Luckhttp://www.bbq-brethren.com/forum/im...ons/icon14.gif

Some guys take the est. attendance and cut that 1/2 and then divide by the food vendors to get an idea of what you can expect.