If you have a passion for both food and music, it makes obvious sense to combine the two and establish your own festival supermarket. Right now, we’re stuck in the middle of festival season, so if you begin planning and prepping to implement your own market, you should be ready to launch at the beginning of next summer, ready to provide happy festival goers with the produce they need. So, what will it take to get your festival supermarket off the ground?

What’s the Plan?

As with any business, you need to generate a robust business plan that includes, but isn’t limited to the following:

• The vision of the project and why you want to embark on it
• The aims/goal of the project
• Who will be involved in it
• What you intend to sell
• How you’re going to fund the project

You might have noticed that these questions start out relatively trivially, but that by the end, you’ll need to spend a lot of time researching and doing calculations to address the questions in the appropriate detail.

For example, for financial planning, you’ll most likely need to speak with a financial advisor at your bank before writing anything down. If you don’t have the appropriate financial backing, you’re going to have to re-assess your situation and re-plan.

Seek the Appropriate Permissions

As part of the plan, you’ll need to seek all of the relevant permissions from the festivals you plan on bringing your supermarket to. The way this generally works, is that you go to the festival’s site and check out their commercial section – usually, they have a form that you can fill out simply and find out whether the festival in question wants your services or not. If you’re only looking to run the supermarket at a couple of festivals, you will only require the support of a couple of festivals, but if you’re looking to invest significantly in this idea, you’ll require the backing of a large number of festivals, so it’s best to do this early on.

Attain the Perfect Equipment

Once you’re fully planned and you’re confident that you’re going to have space at the festivals that you want, you’re ready to start purchasing equipment. This obviously starts with a space to house your goods, such as a semi-permanent structure like the ones available from Neptunes, and fridge freezers with enough power units to power them.

You’ll also need to get in touch with your suppliers and ensure they have the goods you require. If you really want to make it easy for people to spend money in your shop, you could also purchase a card reader and allow your shoppers to make payments on their card. You’ll have to pay a usage fee, but you could always charge your shoppers 50p for the privilege of being able to use their cards in your store.

So there you have it: the steps you need to follow to establish your own festival supermarket. If you love food and you love music, what could be better?

Photo credit: Brutha Nick / Flickr