If food be the music of love, then street food is its livelier, louder relative. It’s towering, juicy beef burgers with spicy relish and crisp lettuce. It’s zingy vegan tofish tacos with a wedge of fresh lime. It’s a huge Neapolitan pizza made right in front of you.
Street food is increasingly becoming the go-to for an after-work bite with a beer, a payday lunch treat, or even something you travel across London for on a rainy Saturday morning. At Bestival this year, food was as much a star of the festival as Grace Jones; the Feast Collective tent, which had its own “line up”, was constantly buzzing with the fizz of food and excitable chatter.
It’s possible that if you love food and are considering a career change, you might have thought about starting up your own street food business. The brains behind the fast-growing, travelling food market KERB certainly know their stuff; we spoke to Ollie Hunter, head of development, to learn more about the nitty gritty of the industry.
Can you tell me a bit about your history, pre-KERB, and then how you came to be KERB’s head of development? What encouraged you into the street food industry?
I’ve been working in the street food industry since 2010, when I started rolling burritos at festivals with [burrito van] Luardos during the summer! I then moved to London and kept working for the burrito van because it was genuinely a lot of fun. Through Luardos I met the KERB team, applied for a job, and got rejected – and applied again. I finally started working for KERB and sort of carved out a niche for myself, doing the odd shift for lots of different traders, which allowed me to see how all these different businesses work. Once you’ve done that you can begin to see the how-to pattern for helping new businesses survive.
Some really exciting things seem to be happening in street food, and one of the things I really love about it is the sense of community and camaraderie among vendors – despite being competitors. Is this something you’ve seen? What else do you love about the industry?
Yeah, it definitely exists, especially within KERB. It’s a bit like moving into a new neighbourhood and seeing the same faces over and over again. The rising tide lifts all boats, so if people try and work together and make the market as good as possible then everyone does better. I think there’s an atmosphere at KERB markets that doesn’t always exist at other ones.
I also really like the freedom that you’re afforded as a street food trader; as long as it’s legal, you can pretty much do whatever you want from the stall. I’d love to see some more inventive ideas when it comes to selling food – you don’t just have to follow the pattern that previous traders have done before.
Are there particular challenges you’ve found, which are unique to this industry versus say, the restaurant industry?
Money-wise, you just don’t get enough time selling food to really be able to expand your business. If you’re doing three pitches a week you might only be selling food for six hours! Making decent money from that is tough.
There’s also the double-edged sword of having a really low barrier to entry, which means that competition is tough; anyone with a good enough idea could start a stall and be up and trading at the same level as someone who’s been trading for a few years, both within six months.
Lots of people I’ve met seem to have great ideas for street food stalls, but turning a niche idea into a reality – particularly in a difficult economic climate for new businesses – is difficult. How do you usually recommend balancing expectations?
The reality is that while you might have a great idea, the execution is actually probably the most important part. This is the same with virtually every industry – lots of people have ideas but the ones who actually start a business make up a tiny minority. I don’t think there are really any illusions that starting a new business, and especially a food business, isn’t hard work.
In every workshop we do we ask what people think the industry is like, and 99% say hard work, but after a year they will say they didn’t realise quite how hard it would be. I think that while people predict it will be physically tiring, they don’t realise how emotional business can be – especially if you’re pouring your heart & soul into it.
I recently saw an Instagram post where one of my favourite vegan street food vendors was saying that cooking is actually a very small percentage of what they do – the rest is managing staff, trying to book events/spaces/festivals, and – largely – loading and unloading vans, driving places, and building/breaking down the stall. What might you say to people who want to start a street food business because they love cooking?
I think a love of cooking is present with every single one of our traders, but loving cooking alone isn’t enough to start a business. You do get to make amazing food and be really creative but until you are making enough money to employ people to do all of logistics and admin stuff then the cooking can take a bit of a backseat. However, the actual excitement and adrenaline of running a brand new business is a lot of fun. The moment when you’ve finished an event and made a decent profit from it and knowing it all came from an idea you had, is far more rewarding than just enjoying cooking.
What do you hope participants of your September masterclass will come away with?
I would expect that a lot of the participants who are coming would love to start their business but need that push to actually do it. When people ask existing street food traders how they start, and hear the reply “we just got started” it can feel like there is something special that they need to know. What we will hopefully give the participants is the confidence to just do it, with clear steps for how they can dive in.
Do you have three quick pieces of advice to people who think they have a great idea for a street food business?
Make food that you actually like rather than what you think will sell. Firstly, you’ll be eating a lot of it. Secondly, it’s almost impossible to second-guess the market. Thirdly, when times are bad, having business that you’re proud of because you’re cooking something you genuinely want to cook, will carry you through rather than one that exists solely to make money.
Constant improvement is the name of the game. If you can identify what’s bad about your business and make small improvements to it they’ll eventually add up to big changes.
People notice even the smallest bits of your business. If you’ve got a dirty gazebo, broken equipment or a rubbish sign, it says more about your business than just the fact that you haven’t got round to fixing a bit of equipment. As Anthony Bourdain said: “If the restaurant can’t be bothered to replace the puck in the urinal or keep the toilets and floors clean, then just imagine what their refrigeration and work spaces look like.” The same theory applies to street food businesses as well.
Ollie Hunter’s Guardian Masterclass, Turn your passion for food into a business, is on Tuesday 18 September.
