Industry Standard: Festival food: Why does it cost so much?

[Robin Garr]

INDUSTRY STANDARD:
Insider Info For Those Who Dine Out
With Columnist Marsha Lynch

With the Lebowski Fest, Forecastle Festival and HullabaLOU all recently put to bed, you might think Louisville's festival season is over until next summer, but you'd be wrong.

Don't forget the Kentucky State Fair. Also, WorldFest is coming up on the riverfront on Labor Day weekend. Waterfront Wednesdays continue through September, and Jeffersontown celebrates the Gaslight Festival in the fall, too. In the late winter, it all starts again with St. Patrick's Day, then Thunder, Derby, Abbey Road on the River and then - oops! - summer 2011 is upon us.

Do you fancy a hot dog? That'll be $4, please. (Cue dramatic music.) A $4 festival hot dog is usually a pretty pedestrian affair: standard pup, standard white-bread bun, relish, onions and a flimsy paper carrier if you're lucky. If you're feeling peckish, you can add an order of fries for maybe $3 and a drink or a bottle of water for another $3, a grand total of $10 per person. So a family of four might enjoy a four-hot dog meal for $40. Yikes. You could probably feed hot dogs, fries and soft drinks to a whole family reunion in your backyard for under $40. So, what gives?

Well, the food vendor gives, mostly. She gives money to her food purveyor for the basic supplies, of course. She gives an hourly wage to her workers (for a three-day festival, that's 12 hours a day, conservatively, at $10 or so per hour, about $360 for one worker for the weekend). She gives a booth space rental fee, often running into the thousands of dollars (a minimum of $2,000 at the Forecastle Festival, for instance). She's forced to give a premium price for beverages to the food-service contract holder for the festival. According to Chef Dan Thomas who ran the backstage food service at Forecastle, vendors were required to purchase all their beverages, including bottled water, from Aramark Corp. (which had negotiated an exclusive contract for the festival with Coca-Cola). Aramark went on to charge vendors $2.75 per 20-ounce bottle, far more than you or I would pay for a two-liter at the convenience store. So, if you were thinking, "They are making a killing at $3 a bottle for water, that's highway robbery!" - not so much.

She's got to pay the Louisville Metro Health Department for a "temporary food service license" - something none of us should begrudge. It's one of the most reasonable vendor expenses of the whole weekend. At a modest $25 for a three-day festival (that's just over six hot dog sales), it helps protect us all from unsanitary practices that might make festival-goers sick with food-borne illnesses.

The vendor also needs refrigerated storage for her supplies. No food booth has enough cooler space to hold several hundred pounds of meat, mayonnaise and ice, so she has to beg, borrow or rent refrigerated space at a nearby restaurant; or she can rent a refrigerated truck to park nearby (another $1,000 or more).

So the next time you belly up to that festival food booth and have the urge to cringe when you read the prices on the board, think about all that goes on behind the scenes, and smile at whoever's handing you your gyros. They are probably hot, tired, overworked and envying you for being on the other side of the counter with your friends or family, enjoying your day off.

Marsha Lynch has worked at many Louisville independent restaurants, including Limestone, Jack Fry's, Jarfi's, L&N Wine Bar and Bistro, and Café Lou Lou. She now works for her alma mater, Sullivan University, as sous chef of the university's new residence hall, Gardiner Point.

Read it on LouisvilleHotBytes:
http://www.louisvillehotbytes.com/festi ... st-so-much
And in LEO Weekly:
http://leoweekly.com/dining/industry-st ... ine-out-19

We've contemplated vending BBQ at a couple of events and can more or less confirm what Marsha wrote. It is (A) expensive and (B) a pain in the ass...so don't look for The Rolling Bones at any festivals anytime soon.

BTW, the whole thing with the soft drinks, water and beer is highway-fricking-robbery. GOTTA be someone named Gino or Angelo involved somewhere.

I went to the Mafiaoza's Music City Brewer's Festival last weekend and found all the prices to be more then fair. All the food (bbq, pizza) look to be excellent values and 12oz waters were $1.

Festival food: Why does it cost so much?
Greed, plain and simple.

http://www.musiccitybrewersfest.com/

"They are making a killing at $3 a bottle for water, that's highway robbery!" - not so much.

The vendors may not be making a killing; however, Aramark is.

Great article, as usual! Aramark being allowed to charge that much for a soda is bad negotiations on the festival organizers, but I'm guessing someone somewhere is getting a nice kickback for that upcharge.

Aramark did pretty well, all in all, as the only provider of soft drinks, and water, as well as the only source for alcohol (not beer) for the various bars. From the promoter's point of view, it's a mixed bag - as a sponsor, Aramark ponied up MANY thousands of dollars for the festival, and needed to recover that somewhere - I just wish it hadn't been at the expense of the attendees and vendors.

Let me also point out that this arrangement is NOT made by JK McKnight, but instead by Nederlander Entertainment. I want to make it clear so there are no hard feelings towards JK - he works his ass off for Forecastle, and must pass some of the business minutae off to the folks at Nederlander, who negotiate such deals.

Unfortunately, the expense of purchasing beverage led many of the food vendors to simply not sell beverage - we were one of these, as it was in no way advantageous to our fundraising efforts for the Salvation Army and ACF's Chef and Child Foundation to make $0.25 on a beverage, or risk losing money if bottles disappeared - one lost drink means having to sell 11 to recover the loss.

My biggest gripe: while we knew ahead of time we would have to purchase from Aramark, it was not until Friday morning that we found out what the pricing scheme would be, leading us to have to make last minute adjustments, not only for the vending booth, but for the backstage operations as well. This created a bit of a logistics crunch we really didn't have the time to deal with, considering the scope of our food service operation for the event.

I am sure that considering the negative press this issue developed (it was the only bad thing I read about Forecastle after the event, and was in several articles), there will be a change in policy for next year. At least, we certainly hope so.

We do vendor fairs all the time. The main factor that makes or breaks you at a vendor fair is the regulations set forth by the people producing the event. Forecastle is almost a losing event unless you charge upwards of $8 a plate because, as Marsha mentioned, they want big $$$ just to get a spot in vendor's row (last year it was $1K, this year they doubled it AND increased the price of admission for patrons! There's yer Greed!). Then they have many, many restrictions about your operation. They insist that you use ONLY bio-degradable materials in your containers and utensils and that your procedures are in compliance with whatever "green" movement is the current fad. And I understand and respect their right to establish and enforce these, but they kill profitability. (eco-friendly materials are great, but depending on your source, they can be triple the cost of standard containers).

Not all vendor fairs are that bad, but more than anything, vendor fairs are unique advertising experiences where you hope to break even.

Now people who are set up to do them for a living, probably have worked it out better and do indeed make a profit, but as a restaurant doing them is usually a gamble.

Aramark
Unfortunately, the expense of purchasing beverage led many of the food vendors to simply not sell beverage - we were one of these, as it was in no way advantageous to our fundraising efforts for the Salvation Army and ACF's Chef and Child Foundation to make $0.25 on a beverage, or risk losing money if bottles disappeared - one lost drink means having to sell 11 to recover the loss.

Screw Aramark...If I'm running this show, I'm letting people bring there own drinks in BUT I'm charging them a buck at the gate (call it a "refuse disposal fee") for each and every plastic bottle or aluminum can that comes in the gate. I guarantee you (A) the people would be happier since they're only paying what ?...a buck and a half for a soda and (B) the promoter is going to make a lot more money in the long run. Don't want to bring your own liquid refreshments ? There's the water cooler right over there, with all the free city water you can drink. Probably a little uninformed and simplistic but ya gotta admit the concept has merit.