Buy cheap, buy twice! This is pretty much the mantra of most street food traders. We’ll be going through equipment, step by step. Gas or electric, what brands are good and what’s good value for money.
Having a great piece of equipment create spectacle around what you’re selling, helping traders stand out from the Cheese Wheel in Camden to Shellybelly’s oil drum.
Before we get into it though, let’s look at a case study of a trader: BBQ Dreamz. The ‘BBQ’ in BBQ Dreamz is a bit of a misnomer as now they don’t BBQ anything! However, when Lee & Sinead started they planned to cook everything on a BBQ. Duck heart, ox hearts, grilled pork belly were all on the lunchtime menu. Their set up was minimal when they first started using the cheapest gazebo and very little else apart from a BBQ.
<aside> 🔥 This is a genuine picture of their first setup, note the BBQ in the right hand corner, and the terrible gazebo!
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https://www.instagram.com/p/BkM6QKkg5ZR/?utm_source=ig_embed
The KERB crew went to taste them on this day and had to help keep the gazebo from flying away. Luckily, the pork lechon was so tasty that everything else was overlooked!
Lee & Sinead eventually invested in better equipment and started to move away from the BBQ. The menu developed to incorporate simpler equipment as they grew as a business. Instead of a BBQ, they could use grills and hobs which was much easier for them and the food was still so good it did not matter.
By adapting their stall, it allowed them to change their set up depending on the event or market. Many events having cooking restrictions where you can only only use electric equipment and some markets have no electric at all, so it’s best practice to be able to cook your food on a range of equipment. Being flexible allows you to get more opportunities, although it might mean you compromise slightly on your original idea.
It is sometimes hard to change your direction when developing a street food business, but it can be exactly what’s needed for the business to succeed. BBQ Dreamz still intend to bring the BBQ back but only when it makes sense operationally – it’s still in the name after all!
You need to choose the best equipment for what YOU want to achieve with your business. This means researching events and markets and asking about cooking restrictions and power allowances. In most cases traders will use a bit of both; gas for heavy duty cooking and electric for lighting and POS systems. As your business grows, you may find yourself with multiple setups tailored to certain events making you a dream trader to work with.
Trading with an electrical setup is generally simple and easy. Once you’ve bought your kit, some extension cables and a converter or two, you’re good to go. Electrical equipment is easy to use and doesn’t present many hazards. For this reason, lots of indoor events will favour an all-electric setup in the interest of health and safety.
However, being reliant on electricity does have some major drawbacks, especially at street food markets. Outdoor power sources are notoriously unreliable. You are unlikely to be supplied with more than a single 16amp feed which won’t go very far when hooked up to powerful cooking equipment. Having 10 traders hooked up to a struggling power source can cause all sorts of issues. One dodgy piece of kit can trip the whole system and put you out of action with nothing but soggy chips to sell.
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