Managing Music Festival Food and Beverage Vendor Reliability and Stock Supplies.

Any large scale multi day music festival needs food and beverage vendors to provide regular meals and drinks for all festival-goers in attendance and the number of vendors selected will vary depending on the event attendance numbers. Vendors have high visibility with festival-goers so providing a quality and reliable service is paramount.

Any festival organisation that experiences food and beverage vendors running out of stock can face reputational damage as festival-goers will often be very quick to make posts about it on social media. This can make damage limitation very difficult for organisers so it is imperative that reliable vendors who can manage their supplies are selected. A combination of factors can cause supply problems and range from poor demand estimates, power outages, slow restocking access routes to overly complex menus that slow down service provision. What can organisers do to select reliable vendors who can manage food and beverage supplies.

Vendor Selection Process.
Applications for vendor places at popular music festivals are often oversubscribed, which means that organisers will have a wide variety of potential vendors to choose from. Many organisers implement strict selection criteria which typically include previous festival experience, menu variety and pricing, and robust supply chains that can meet demand. Other factors will be accurate meal throughput volume estimates plus staff experience and coverage. Vendors will also be expected to provide all the required certifications and evidence of their sustainability credentials. All vendors selected should have their performance monitored during the event with metrics like stockouts, revenue per vendor, customer complaints, and queue times. This data can be used for the vendor selection process in the future.

Contracts and Expectations.
Organisers can specify in the contracts and agreements they have with vendors certain performance metrics and overall expectations. It is not unusual for organisers to specify that vendors maintain minimum buffer stock levels of 25% per day. In addition, Service Level Agreements are included, like maximum queue times and compliance with specified operating hours. Financial penalties can be specified for any stockout situation or curtailed operating hours, for example. Some organisers provide a central storage zone on site where vendors can store stock which can quickly be deployed to vendors on demand, saving the hassle of waiting for deliveries from off-site locations. This storage area can also contain the organiser's own supplies of drinking water and basic dry food should they need to maintain crowd safety during an emergency.

Festival Site Infrastructure and Logistics Support.
Organisers must provide a good festival site infrastructure that enables food and beverage vendors to operate efficiently. Every pitch space must be connected to a reliable source of electricity and water with regular waste collection. Power failures are not unusual and can severely impact the ability of vendors to operate at all. Some organisers provide specific vendor zone backup generators to ensure a continuous supply of power should the main site power source fail. Large festival organisations usually have an individual with specific responsibility for vendor management, vendor selection, infrastructure connection and on-site troubleshooting. Organisers can improve vendor performance by careful site planning, ensuring that they are placed in a logical location to meet customer demand without creating crowd surges. Festival staff can also provide assistance in crowd management to improve queuing systems by incorporating separate channels for app based pre-ordered meals and VIPs, for example. Most festivals now operate cashless events, and vendors need to operate robust POS and payment systems that sync with festival-goer wristbands.

Vendor Stock Management.
Vendor Managers who work for the festival entity need to work closely with selected vendors to help them forecast demand and stock levels. Estimated festival-goer numbers combined with performance schedules can help vendors predict peak demand periods during the event. In some cases, the Vendor Manager will also have access to historical data from pervious events that can make demand estimates more accurate. Organisers may request regular updates from vendors on their stock status with reports on current stock levels and estimates of when they will restock. This can be a combination of manual checks by festival staff or electronic real time reporting using POS data, for example.

For festival organisers planning their next event using a software management platform like Festival Pro gives them all the functionality they need manage every aspect of their event logistics including a dedicated vendor management module. The guys who are responsible for this software have been in the front line of event management for many years and the features are built from that experience and are performance artists themselves. The Festival Pro platform is easy to use and has comprehensive features with specific modules for managing artists, contractors, venues/stages, vendors, volunteers, sponsors, guestlists, ticketing, site planning, cashless payments and contactless ordering.

Image by Julia M Cameron via Pexels

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