Festivals and Fairs: What Organizers Should Expect

If you run a festival, a fair or a town event, you already know that food vendors are a category of risk. Some turn up late, some sell out at four in the afternoon, some are not what they said they were, and every one of those becomes your problem rather than theirs.

We attend a good number of events across Tennessee with a wood-fired pizza truck. This is what we ask organizers, why we ask it, and what you should expect from us in return.

What we ask you, and why

When someone invites us to an event, we ask five things. Your honest answers let us tell you whether we are a match for your event, and whether your attendees are going to be happy with what we bring.

Name and dates of the event

Obvious, and it tells us whether it clashes with a wedding we have already booked. Our summer and fall weekends fill early.

Location

We are based in Coalmont and we work from Nashville down to Chattanooga and from Fayetteville across to Crossville and Pikeville. Distance is a real cost for a vehicle this size, so it affects whether a date makes sense for us.

How many years has your event existed?

A first-year event can be excellent, and a fifteenth-year event has a track record. We are not ruling out new events. We are trying to understand the risk we are taking on, the same way you are when you take on a vendor you have not used before.

What is your verifiable historic attendance?

Verifiable is the word that matters. Every event has an optimistic number and a real one. We plan dough two days ahead against the figure you give us, so an inflated estimate costs us money and an underestimate means we sell out early and your attendees are the ones disappointed.

Gate counts, ticket sales, a previous vendor’s numbers, anything with a basis. A best guess clearly labeled as a guess is far more useful than a confident number that is not real.

How many other food trucks will be attending?

This is the question organizers are most surprised by, and it is the one that decides most of our answers. Five hundred people and two trucks is a good day for the trucks and for the attendees. Five hundred people and five trucks is a long, slow day, most of those trucks will not do well, and they will not come back the following year.

Here is a rough formula for working out how many trucks your event should have.

1. Take your expected attendance and halve it. That is roughly how many people will actually buy food.
2. If your event runs five hours or more, or the event is about food, raise that to 80 percent instead.
3. Divide the result by the number of trucks you are thinking of booking. If the answer is under 120, you have too many trucks.

We are not asking for exclusivity. We are asking whether the arithmetic works. An organizer who knows the answer and gives it straight is an organizer who has thought about their vendors, and that is a good sign about everything else.

How long is your event?

Pizza cooked to order takes longer than almost any other food you will have on site. That puts a ceiling on how many orders we can take in a day, and hours are what raise the ceiling.

A longer event lets us serve more people. That matters to you, because fewer attendees walk away without eating, and it matters to us, because the hours are what make the trip worth taking. We typically need at least a four-hour event. Shorter ones we look at case by case, so it is worth asking.

What you should expect from us

We show up early. A brick oven does not heat quickly. It heats up over hours and is then held at that temperature, so we are on site and lit long before your gates open.

We bring enough. Dough is made two days ahead against the attendance figure you gave us, and we cook against that plan rather than reacting to the line in front of us.

We take our waste with us. Your grounds crew has enough to do.

What we need from the site

• A reasonably level parking area with room to open an awning
• A route in that a large vehicle can take, including gate width and overhead clearance
• Solid ground that will not get a very heavy truck stuck, particularly if the weather has been wet
• Load-in times that let us arrive early. We are quick to load out.

We do not need a power or water hookup. We are fully self-contained. The oven burns wood and the wood travels with us, a quiet inverter generator covers everything else, and we carry our own fresh water and a gray water tank, so hand washing and dishes happen on the truck. Nothing gets hooked up and nothing gets emptied at your venue.

Why a wood-fired truck is a good draw

Wood-fired pizza is hard to find in this part of Tennessee. Even in brick-and-mortar restaurants it is close to impossible, so it is not something your attendees can get on an ordinary week, and that on its own brings people over.

After that it spreads on its own. Once a few people are walking the field with a slice, everybody else wants to know where it came from, and that traffic helps whoever you have placed near us. We have a saying about it: the more we sell, the more we sell.

The food is Neapolitan-style, made from a dough that takes 32 to 38 hours and usually longer. The process is written out here if you want to know what your attendees are actually getting, and the menu is here.

Inviting us

Send the name of the event, the dates, the location, how many years it has run, your verifiable historic attendance, and how many other food trucks will be there. Tell us how long the event runs while you are at it. We will give you a straight yes or no rather than leaving you waiting.

If you would rather see the same list written out, it is on our catering page.