How London's food trucks became big business

A couple of years back, the food trucks that started serving up deliciousness all over the capital seemed like a whole lot of ramshackle fun. But in 2017 they became big, serious business, discovers Rebecca Seal

Rebecca Seal

7 December 2017

‘By every single measure, it’s harder having a permanent space than doing street food,’ laughs Thom Elliot, who co-founded Pizza Pilgrims in a Piaggio van in 2012 and now has eight restaurants in London and Oxford.

‘The only way in which it is easier is that you’re not starting from scratch every day, so you can build a system, rather than always looking for somewhere to put the cling film. And you don’t have to work out what to do if it is 10 times windier than it was yesterday. But with a fixed address the paperwork goes through the roof compared with having a van. You’re busier, you’re more legit and people are more demanding.’

There are now dozens of day-and-night food and farmers markets spread across the city — and hundreds of traders selling top-end food to an ever-growing, ever-hungry fan base. Many of the best traders have made or plan to make the leap from wet-and-windy marketplace to a warmer, drier, permanent venue. Street food has gone serious.

Rik Campbell set up rave-reviewed Indian pop-up Kricket with his business partner, Will Bowlby, in a shipping container as part of Pop Brixton in 2015, and a year ago moved to a permanent site in Soho. ‘At Pop Brixton almost everything was thought about for us — security, licensing, toilets — but when you have your own place, it never stops. We enjoy it, but if anything goes wrong you have to deal with it yourself.’ Kricket thrived from the outset, but up to two thirds of all new restaurants fail within three years of opening. Since starting a traditional bricks-and-mortar site can cost as much as £1 million, the losses can be huge if a business collapses. ‘The limitations of the shipping container were that it was tiny with a tiny kitchen, but for us a two-year pop-up was a good way to start, because it meant we could set up a 20-cover restaurant for £45,000.’

Meatliquor

It’s easy to think of street food traders and pop-up chefs as hipster hobbyists, with their penchant for beards, tattoos, denim aprons and vintage vans, but the reality is that it takes an immense amount of work to make a van or stall successful, and even more to turn one into a permanent venue (a startling number of stallholders are ex-City workers or former professionals who have given up so-called ‘proper jobs’ for street food). Profits may be low, but most stalls can expect to turn over around £100,000 a year — even on a cold, wet day, they might sell £500 worth of food, and in a bad month could still take as much as £9,000, assuming they appear at four markets a week and a couple of private events.

Ben Chancellor, a self-styled 21st-century mod who rode a scooter in the closing ceremony of the 2012 Olympics, worked in music, PR and the City before he started Sub Cult with chef Gareth Phillips, serving award-winning American-style deli sandwiches. After collaborations with Michelin-starred chefs Tom Aikens and Tom Sellers, they opened a sandwich deli in Liverpool Street in July. ‘You’ve got to weigh up if you want to be struggling on a small wage in the capital doing street food forever,’ says Chancellor.

Dough boys: Pizza Pilgrims founders, James and Thom Elliot

‘Street food is fun and you get to build relationships with your customers face-to-face. It’s casual and inclusive but it’s hard work and very seasonal — you could have endless queues in the summer, but only the hardcore will come out in the winter. I’m a 39-year-old married man with a mortgage, which I got before I started Sub Cult. Did I want to get up at dawn and have no pension forever? Without a trust fund, I needed an end plan.’ Is there a risk of selling out when you move indoors? ‘Of course, but there are a lot of companies out there that still have their integrity and if anything have got greater recognition from going permanent — like Bao, Breddos, Smokestak or Pizza Pilgrims.’

Bao buns

Bao was garlanded with plaudits from the moment it moved from Netil Market into a permanent site in 2015; it now has three venues. ‘As a street food operation it had very limited space and cooking capability — and it was very physical having to set up our stall every time, sometimes only for two hours,’ says Shing Tat Chung, co-founder of Bao and Xu. ‘If the weather turns it can be an awful day, whereas now we have a fully kitted kitchen. The nicest thing about being permanent is just being able to settle in.’

Expectations can be far higher in a restaurant though. ‘In a van, you’re the underdog,’ says Elliot. At a market or festival, you might be thrilled to get a messy taco with spicy fillings slithering out of a take-out box, but it’s a different matter inside a restaurant where minor missteps can send Google, Facebook, TripAdvisor and Yelp ratings crashing through the floor.

Breddos

The best-known stall-gone-serious is Meatliquor, and following the path it established might just be the best way for a slider-slinging, vegan gyoza-wrapping wannabe restaurateur to go. Yianni Papoutsis started his burger van, Meatwagon, with £3,000 in 2009, before teaming up with publican Scott Collins in 2011 and morphing the van into the first Meatliquor venue. They now have 11 sites in London, Brighton and Leeds, with sales of £11 million in 2016.

For most businesses, changing gears that fast requires external support and an injection of cash (Meatliquor’s backers include David Page, former chief executive of Pizza Express). While it is impossible to predict which restaurants will survive, moving an existing street food business inside does seem less hazardous than opening a completely new concept.

‘Investing in a street food trader de-risks things to a certain extent,’ says Simon Mitchell, managing director of Kerb, which runs year-round street food markets and events across London. ‘We get contacted by at least one investor a week, because our traders have already proved themselves in a tough environment, there’s a clear demand for their food, they know their demographics and they’ve probably got 10,000 followers on Instagram and a mailing list already.’ Kerb supports its members with training and mentoring, and by providing permanent 364-day-a-year street food pitches at Camden Market (‘a great middle ground to test themselves’). Mitchell’s team also advises traders who want investment without giving away all their equity. His long-term plan is to create a Kerb fund to which traders can apply.

Laughing all the way to the van: Sub Cult’s Gareth Phillips and Ben Chancellor

He is not alone in this ambition. As well as investors like Page, a new breed of smaller-scale backers and venture capitalists has emerged in tandem with the street food trend. Chris Miller started White Rabbit Fund in April 2016, after working in private equity and then for Soho House. ‘I helped Meatliquor with some financials and quickly realised there were all these chefs out there who didn’t know much about property, legal or finance, who needed a platform, like an incubator. London is the Silicon Valley of food and very similar to the tech space: there are a lot of failures but a few rock stars. If you get it right with a concept that can scale, there’s money to be made.’ He is one of Kricket’s backers, helping it to expand with a second site in the BBC Television Centre; he also backed Island Poké.

‘I spent three months eating at every market and restaurant in a shipping container with a two-hour queue I could find,’ he says. ‘I met a guy called James doing poké [a Hawaiian raw fish dish] who had two items on his menu. I tasted them and they were great [so] I gave him all the support he needed. Today, the queues are ridiculous, with venues in Kingly Street and Broadgate Circle, and a third opening in Canary Wharf. I do the boring stuff so they can concentrate on the food.’ This is no vanity project. ‘The returns are phenomenal,’ he claims. ‘The target is that they pay back their investment within one to two years. We’ve been lucky so far: they’ve all been profitable in the first few months.’

Kricket in Soho

Other street food backers include Ennismore, the company behind The Hoxton hotel, which helped Breddos tacos open on Goswell Street and Kingly Street. ‘We’d never call ourselves investors; instead we think of ourselves as a partner,’ says Sharan Pasricha from Ennismore. ‘Internally, partnering with interesting street food businesses allows our team to work on different projects, learn how other businesses operate and add an extra layer to Ennismore’s portfolio. At this stage we really only take on ones that we’re excited by, ones that we’d want to eat at every day — and I know some of the team do eat in Breddos every day!’ What advice would Breddos give to other traders looking for investment? ‘Run your numbers, do your research, and make sure the investor has something to add to your business beyond money,’ says Nud Dudhia. ‘We work with the team at Ennismore collaboratively across all aspects of the business. Embrace their experience and maturity, and make sure their ambition aligns with your business.’

JKS Restaurants — run by the three siblings behind Gymkhana, Trishna and Hoppers — backed Bao (as well as Lyle’s and Bubbledogs). Code, a hospitality consultancy led by Adam Hyman, is another small-scale backer. ‘The beauty of street food traders is that they’ve tested their idea on paying customers already,’ says Hyman. ‘The other thing I like is that they’re grafters.’ Hyman, his business partner and Hyman’s father all take minority stakes in the businesses they invest in, which include Sub Cult and Butchies, a buttermilk fried chicken sandwich spot that opened on Rivington Street just two weeks ago. ‘It’s the people we invest in. We genuinely enjoy working with Ben and Gaz from Sub Cult. Garrett and Emer Fitzgerald from Butchies have grown an amazing brand from a stall on Broadway Market; they’re a pleasure to work with.’

Kricket

‘Half our investment came from Code and half from 10 of our own investors,’ says Garrett Fitzgerald. ‘It means the money is nicely spread out among a diverse mix of people — one of our investors, Benjamin Cleary, used to work on the stall.’ He is now an Oscar-winning director. ‘Pizza Pilgrims had 15 investors at the beginning,’ says Elliot. ‘They all put in £10,000-£20,000, which is a lot but not so much that they were breathing down our necks for returns.’

If it all sounds rather grown-up, that’s because it is. David Carter from Smokestak in E1 always wanted to turn his cult barbecue stall — which he started after stints working at Roka and for Gordon Ramsay — into a restaurant. It continues to be wildly popular, but he still takes it very seriously. ‘We need positive cash flow because our 35 employees are depending on it,’ he says.