9 minute read
Feast Streat | New concept offers authentic, restaurant-quality street food in a mass market format.
WORD ON THESTREET
With the street food revolution continuing to pick up pace, Ryan McGillicuddy’s Feast Streat concept is answering the call for authentic, restaurant-quality street food in a mass market format.
Street food: it’s the buzzword zinging off the nation’s lips and storming the menus of catering outlets as demand for the flavourforward concept continues to grow. But it hasn’t always been this way. While street food has been around thousands of years – the ancient Greeks are well-documented to have been big fans – the concept certainly didn’t possess the sizzle, shine and show it does today.
One man who knows all about the “street food revolution” is Ryan McGillicuddy, Commercial Director of the successful Feast Streat business that operates more than 25 restaurant-quality street food brands like The Gourmet Chip Co, Comida Mexicana, Street Greek, Urban Kebab and Mumbai Kitchen. The company supplies over 400 big-ticket events a year across the country. Ryan supplies over 400 big-ticket events a year across the country including the multi-million pound Sail GP event, the Adventure Bike Rider Festival, the Southport Air Show and a whole range of concerts from Tom Jones to Paloma Faith.
But, as Ryan explains, he certainly can't be accused of just jumping on the street food bandwagon when it began rolling – he helped to get the movement’s wheels turning in the first place, and now he’s about to crank it up another gear. “I’m a fourth-generation market trader, so food and markets have always been in my blood,” he says. “However, one thing that struck me very early on was that quality of the meals being served was pretty terrible. In the late 80s and 90s, when I was a kid, it was all about the price point and hardly ever about the quality. So, in my late teens I decided to try and do something about that.”
That decision took a young Ryan to Europe where he “nicked a few ideas” before returning home to the West Midlands armed with a giant paella pan and ladles of enthusiasm. “I started out with a plan to cook and serve gourmet hot dogs,” he says, “In the early 2000s, customers still weren’t that adventurous. My idea was to take a really simple product and make it really good. I got some award-winning local sausages which I cooked up in this giant paella pan and served them in local bakery bread with real onions chopped fresh. People loved it. The smell of the onions, the theatre of the giant pan, the whole offer had a real ‘wow factor’ which is essentially what street food is all about.”
Ryan’s business continued to gain momentum so when the street food boom hit hard a decade ago, he was already well ahead of the curve and regularly
THE LOWDOWN
FEAST STREAT
Outlet: Feast Streat Format: Mass market street food supplier Established: 2005 Commercial Director: Ryan Patrick McGillicuddy Kitchen team: Three chefs, one baker, two butchers, five kitchen prep staff, one operations manager
being booked by local councils and show organisers, keen to offer his gourmet hot dogs at their events. “The street food revolution helped to fuel this momentum,” says Ryan. ”Price points were pushed up, customers became more adventurous and street-eating became stylish. “It opened the market up which was great but it also removed our niche. Prior to the boom, if you wanted street-food style catering for your event in the West Midlands, you came to us. I knew I would need to re-invent our niche.”
To do that, Ryan went after what he saw as “a very distinct gap in the market.” He explains: “There was an enormous gap with small independent street food vendors at one end and large-scale show caterers at the other – but no-one in the middle. The opportunity to establish a business that could offer restaurantquality street food in a wide range of different cuisines but at mass volume was clear, so in 2005 that’s what I set out to do.”
In the 16 years since, Ryan’s Feast Streat concept has boomed and he now supplies up to 400 events a year with high quality chef-made street foods from his 25 in-house street food brands. “On average, our business does anywhere between 15,000 and 30,000 meals a week, and we’ll do anything from a small local fete up to an event for 250,000 people,” he explains.
Feast Streat’s brands feature cuisines from around the word, so it can cater to pretty much all tastes and trends. “We probably have the largest range of global cuisines from one provider in the UK,” Ryan adds. “Greek Food, under our ‘Street Greek’ brand, is currently the most-popular culinary style that we offer but Caribbean is close behind, and we’ve recently launched a new ‘Island Bay Caribbean Street Food' brand which is flying.”
Helping Ryan deliver his flavour-fuelled meals to the masses is a state-of-the-art Feast Street HQ – a former wholesale meat factory with commercial production kitchens, a butchery department and staff training facilities. Inside, a team of specialist butchers, kitchen staff and chefs prep, marinade and cook all meals from scratch in vast volumes. “We make everything from scratch,” Ryan says. “We don’t buy in chilli or curry, we make it all freshly and in seriously big volumes – 200 kilos of Chili Con Carne at a time. It’s then portioned, vac packed, chilled, date labelled and sent out to shows nationwide, where the remaining cooking process is carried out by specialist show operations teams.”
Booker supplies the vast majority of the products Ryan uses. “My relationship with Booker goes right back to the beginning when I’d regularly visit my local Kingswinford branch,” says Ryan. “These days the volumes are too big for me to collect in person! We get one enormous delivery from Booker every week which gives my team enough time to put it all away before prepping, cooking and packaging all the meals ready for transportation to the various events and festivals.
“About 70% of our products come from Booker but that’s likely to increase when we start using Booker to supply all our fresh chicken which their butchers will be prepping for us – a major time-saving benefit for our team. Some weeks we need a tonne of fresh chicken and to prep that ourselves is a gargantuan task. Booker supplying it ready-prepped will reduce our team’s workload by around 40%."
RYAN'S SPECIAL BOARD
Quality matters Quality is everything when it comes to street food, never cut corners in a bid to cut costs.
Flavour of the times Demand for Greek foods such as wraps are in growth at the moment with Caribbean flavours catching up.
Sustainable practices Buy eco-friendly packaging wherever possible. All our cutlery, napkins, boxes and plates come from Booker and all are biodegradable. Sustainability is so important to our customers and central to our business ethos.
FEAST STREAT COMMERCIAL DIRECTOR RYAN PATRICK MCGILLICUDDY
“We also buy a tonne of fries a week from Booker – literally - and pretty much all of our store cupboard ingredients, tinned goods, vegetables, drinks, cleaning products and packaging,” Ryan adds. "Booker offers a fantastic range of ecofriendly biodegradable products which is so important to us. Today’s diners are increasingly eco-conscious and are also much more demanding about quality. Fortunately, diners are also happy to pay a premium for great-quality foods. Our average meals costs about £8 and can go up to £12 but it’s great quality food, prepped and cooked by real chefs; diners are more than happy to pay for that.
“The general appetite for street food continues to be huge. Diners just love it! It’s the fastest-growing section of the hospitality industry and it’s even becoming a big trend in restaurants, with a growing number of venues adding “street food” style meals to their menus. They love the choice, the theatre, the taste. Street food is defi nitely here to stay!”
Never one to rest on his laurels, Ryan is currently looking to launch a support scheme for small independent vendors. “The plan is to launch a new scheme that will put small, independent street food vendors through an incubation process and bring them up to speed on how to operate at a commercially successful level," he enthuses.
“The Feast Streat Collective will take on independents under a partnership arrangement, where they will pay us commission in return for us showing them exactly how to operate at large-scale shows. We’ll take care of their bookings and paperwork, we’ll put the infrastructure in for them, the marquees, the counters and their own-brand banners. All they will have to do is turn up and cook their own great-quality food.
“We have a Nepalese couple who are in the process of signing up to the scheme and when it launches in 2023, they will be able to serve up their own utterly authentic Nepalese food, including real family recipes, cooked at corporate level professionalism, which will be simply fantastic. It’s really very exciting and I can’t wait to see where it goes.”
BRAND BANK
25 DIFFERENT STREET FOOD BRANDS
