Last week Phil and I did a food stall at the IXDS Summer Party during the Berlin Design Night. Over 400 people came to the parties at Paul-Lincke-Ufer 39/40, where multiple companies base their offices in former industrial warehouses. We went on a Southern comfort food slant again, and served 180 portions of Louisiana gumbo and cornbread.
Learnings from the event
- Get props, decorations and lights for your food stall: they make your stall look friendlier, prettier and you’re not serving in the dark after the sun sets.
- Having your flyer or Moo cards on the food stall helps people keep in touch and follow up on your next events.
- Get to know the food stalls next to yours and do a food swap! Chefs need to eat too, and after cooking pots of gumbo, it was good to not eat gumbo for dinner. We instead had vodka-laced smoothies from Bonativo and okonomiyaki from the guys next to us.
- Getting a proper “gastro” cooking top was the best investment ever: ours heated up in no time and was a solid piece of stainless joy to use and easily clean up afterwards.
- Make a “prototype” of the food you’re selling: we discovered that some customers didn’t know what gumbo was, and most of the Germans thought cornbread was a sweet snacky bread thing. So we quickly made a bowl of gumbo with cornbread, styled it and placed in front for people to see what they were getting for 5€.
- Better to sell out, than having leftovers! We were briefed to make 200 portions of food but we stuck to 180 portions instead: we sold everything off, gave away the remaining cornbread to the IXDS team and didn’t have to eat gumbo the next day ; )
It was a lot of fun, but super tiring! Quite a learning experience for us. We will do this again, just not on a weekly basis like the chefs of Street Food Thursday. See you at our next pop-up or foodstall!
