Festivals
Festival catering is a completely different animal from wedding catering. And I mean that literally. At a wedding, I am cooking a whole deer for 120 guests who are seated, patient, and expecting a five-course experience. At a festival, I am cooking 600 venison kebabs for people who have been standing in a field for six hours, are three pints deep, and want food now.
Both are brilliant. But the skills are different, the pace is different, and the chaos is on another level. Here is what I have learned from years of festival catering - and why I think it has made me a better chef.
In the 2025 festival season alone, we served at over 15 events including the O2 Greenwich, Meatopia, The Game Fair, and multiple county shows. At peak service, we can put out 200 covers per hour from a single stand. That is not reheated stuff from a bain-marie - that is wild venison, cooked to order on a live fire plancha.
The UK festival food market is worth over £1.2 billion annually according to the Association of Independent Festivals. And attendees are increasingly discerning. The days of overpriced soggy chips being acceptable are over. People want quality, provenance, and something they cannot get at home.
When you are cooking at a festival, you cannot hide behind presentation or ambience. The food has to speak for itself. If your venison kebab is not better than the burger van next door, the queue moves on. That pressure makes you sharper.
- Cai
Our festival menu is designed for speed without sacrificing quality. Everything is cooked on the plancha or over the fire pit. Nothing is pre-cooked or microwaved. The core menu typically includes:
We also always have a vegetarian option - usually fire-roasted halloumi wraps or charred vegetable flatbreads. No afterthought. Properly thought through.
This is the part nobody sees. A typical festival weekend starts on Thursday. We arrive with the truck, the fire equipment, the cold storage, and enough produce to feed a small army. Setup takes a full day - gas lines, fire safety, food hygiene station, signage, lighting.
Then there is the supply chain. Wild venison does not come vacuum-packed from a warehouse. We prepare everything in our own butchery before the event. Every kebab is hand-skewered. Every sausage is hand-linked. The meatball mix is made fresh. When you are prepping for 2,000 covers, that is industrial-scale work done by hand.
I will be honest - festivals are exhausting. Eighteen-hour days in the heat (or the rain). Sleeping in the truck. Cooking through the night for late-night crowds. But they are also where we convert more new customers than anywhere else.
Think about it. At a wedding, the bride and groom booked us. The guests might not have chosen us. At a festival, every single customer chose us. They walked past ten other options and picked our stand. When they taste wild venison cooked over fire for the first time, something clicks. We get more wedding enquiries from festival customers than from any other marketing channel.
Here is something I did not expect when I started festival catering: the queue is marketing. When people see 30 others waiting for your food, they join. When they smell the smoke and see the flames, they stop. When they watch me carve venison off the bone on the plancha, they pull out their phones.
We have had festival videos go viral on Instagram with over 100,000 views. Not because we paid for promotion, but because a customer filmed the cooking and shared it. That is the power of doing something visually spectacular with genuinely excellent food.
From intimate private parties to festivals for thousands - we bring the fire wherever you need it.
Event Catering PackagesFestival season 2026 is already booking up. If you are an event organiser looking for a catering option that will genuinely elevate your festival, get in touch. And if you are a punter who tried our venison kebab at Meatopia and is reading this - you are welcome. Now book us for your wedding.
- Cai
