“Three days of peace & music”, read the billing for the Woodstock Music and Art Fair in the summer of 1969. Notice there was no mention of gourmet street-food stalls selling deliciously indulgent raw food bowls served with kimchi fermented in the trendiest east London postcodes.

Because there was a time, music-festival veterans will recall, when food was merely a means to line the stomach, and the choice was easy, if unenticing: sloppy lentils from the Hare Krishna tent or a greasy burger from a white van. Those days, however, are long gone. Over the past decade or so, the culinary credentials of a festival have become increasingly important, and the trend seems to be accelerating.

“Something strange started happening at the start of this summer,” says James Lowe, head chef and owner of Michelin-starred Lyle’s restaurant in London’s Shoreditch. Lowe has friends who visit Coachella, the cult Californian music festival, every year and, “Usually, they bombard Instagram with photos of their boho-chic outfits. This time, all the pictures were of what they were eating. It’s like festival food has suddenly overtaken festival fashion as the new trendy thing.”

Indian chain Dishoom is making its first festival appearance at Lost Village (an immersive music and theatre event in Lincolnshire) this August. And Lowe himself will be cooking a six-course tasting menu at Wilderness in Oxfordshire. So, has food finally become a headline act at music festivals?


Paul Reed is chief executive of the Association of Independent Festivals. Its research, he says, suggests that spending on food and drink at independent festivals was 36 per cent higher in 2017 than in 2008. “Customer expectations have shifted considerably and, in some cases, food and beverage options can be as important as the music and arts programming itself,” Reed says.

© Matt Blease

Jim King agrees. He is executive vice president of Live Music at AEG Presents, one of the world’s largest live-music companies and the producer behind Coachella, All Points East and BST Hyde Park. “It’s an integral part of the event experience and very important to our bottom line,” he says.

Within Europe, music festival tickets now cost an average €148.36. For this amount, attendees expect a more luxurious experience — and bring the cash to pay for it. So, festival organisers have begun to place on the billing “everything from the dirtiest gourmet burger to the freshest, healthiest smoothie,” says King. “It’s only right that a first-class food offering caters for their needs, be that very specific dietary requirements or the most excessive indulgence.”

Music festivals, in other words, have come a long way from peace, love and pizza. “We started selling food at festivals 25 years ago,” says Pura Vida founder John Eveleigh, whose Mexican food attracts hordes each summer at UK festivals from Green Man to Kendal Calling. “Back then, the food scene was really cheap and pretty dire — giant hot dogs, greasy fish and chips . . . the sort of stuff you’d see outside Blackburn football club.”

In those days, the margins, if little else, were tasty. “The ingredients for a burger would cost about 13p and it would sell at festivals for £2.30. But we started using lots of fresh ingredients. Introducing real cooking meant more staff. You’re replicating a restaurant kitchen, basically, so your margins are much, much tighter.”

Eveleigh persevered and, by the mid-noughties, change was in the air. The number of festivals began to proliferate. “Around the time The Big Chill was going strong, festival organisers began to realise they could differentiate themselves by putting on better food,” he says. Today, he oversees all the catering at the End of the Road and Cornbury festivals, picking food traders who would make those he encountered in his early days sink into the mud with shame. “I think of it like curating,” he says. “I keep a keen eye on who’s up-and-coming, what trends are on the rise.”

This year, revellers at End of the Road can fill up on anything from chipotle brisket, served out of Luardos’ shocking-pink, retro Citroën, to a “rosary goat’s cheese, honey, walnut and rosemary butter” grilled sandwich, from The Cheese Truck’s vintage Bedford truck. “I’d like to think the food has become second only to the music,” Eveleigh says. Punters queue for up to half an hour at popular food stalls and have started to ask about the ingredients or “chat about food more broadly”.

Here, I should make a confession. At End of the Road in 2016, I queued at a food truck serving vegan sushi rolls (outrageously delicious and surprisingly effective as a hangover cure), and missed the first 10 minutes of Meilyr Jones’s set, the very act I’d gone all that way to see.

But does a music festival lose something if you swap dancing all night for dithering over the relative merits of Vietnamese banh mi or gluten-free polenta cake? “It’s all a long way from my long-haired hippy days,” admits Eveleigh. “But there’s a festival for everyone now.”


This March, CGA Strategy, a consumer research group, published a report on festival-goers’ attitudes towards food and drink. Almost two-thirds of the 5,000 survey respondents cited “a diverse selection of food and drink stalls” as an important factor when deciding which festivals to attend.

The line-up at last year’s Flow Festival in Helsinki included the American pop star Frank Ocean but its more than 40 on-site restaurants were also advertised prominently, as were its eco-friendly credentials. In Northamptonshire, Shambala promotes the fact that all food sold on site is vegetarian, as does The Way Out West Festival in Gothenburg.

“There’s been a massive cultural shift towards people learning about health, fitness and nutrition,” says Annabel Burton, a 22-year-old student who, this summer, will be launching her solution to a distinctly modern problem: what to do when your clean-eating regime clashes with your music festival schedule.

“My boyfriend and I are massive festival-goers, but last summer we were on a health kick,” she says. “We went to the Boomtown festival in Hampshire, started searching for something nutritious to eat and all we could find was fruit.” Enter the “world’s first” mobile avocado trailer. “We spent £1,000 on a crumbling horse trailer and about £5,000 doing it up and kitting it out with a big fridge, a grill and a smoothie maker.”

So far, festivals have been enthusiastic about The Avocado Trailer, as Burton’s venture is named. “Lots of places [have] let us in even though we applied late, or given us discounts because what we’re doing is so different,” she says. Their string of bookings culminates with Jimmy’s Festival in Suffolk at the end of July, where their star dish will be “half an avocado griddled and topped with a scoop of salmon and cream cheese; or our vegan option — mango salsa”. What festivals offer their audiences at any given time, Burton says, simply holds up a mirror to wider cultural trends.


I have paid the best part of a tenner for the privilege of eating a superfood salad on a carpet of scorched grass and cigarette butts, but grudgingly. According to CGA Strategy, the cost of food and drink on site is the second most common gripe cited by festival goers. Are festival traders exploiting food’s fashionable moment — and a captive audience — in order to rip us off? Not according to Mike O’Shea. His company, Pho Sho, will be serving Vietnamese street food at End of the Road this August, while he also runs the food markets at Lambeth Country Show and The Long Road Festival.

Festival food is a high-stakes game, O’Shea explains, offering tempting possibilities but mammoth hidden costs as well. “Both my parents were in the restaurant industry, and I watched them work their arses off, seven days a week,” he says. Now, as festival catering gains in kudos and quality: “You don’t need the responsibility of a bricks-and-mortar restaurant with all the associated overheads. All you need is a gazebo. I know people who work really intensely at summer festivals, and then head off to India and live like kings for the rest of the year. It’s a great life if you get it right, so the pool of festival food traders gets bigger every year. But it’s an incredibly risky existence.”

© Matt Blease

Consider the upfront costs. “Most commonly, you’ll pay a one-off fee when you sign up to trade at the festival,” says O’Shea. These pitch fees vary wildly but average about £3,000, payable several months in advance. Plus, he says, festivals charge food traders for electricity and water: “It’s another revenue stream for them. You could end up paying up to £600 for power.” Aim to trade at 10 summer festivals, in other words, and you might need to find £36,000 well before you have begun to make any cash. Other festivals charge a smaller upfront fee and then take a percentage: “Typically, 10 per cent of gross revenue. That’s a fairer way of doing it.” Even then, things can go drastically wrong.

“A food trader who’s been in the game for a while might make £15,000 gross from a festival,” O’Shea explains. “After your pitch, staff and ingredients, you need to hit £8,000 to £10,000 just to break even.”

To do that, O’Shea must serve about 700 customers a day. It’s hot, intense work for long hours but the alternative is worse. “If you get put in a shit spot, with low footfall, you might haemorrhage thousands of pounds,” he says. “A couple of bad festivals in a row can bankrupt you. It happens a lot.”

It’s therefore essential to pick the right festival. “For food, what you really want is a high-end, family-friendly festival,” says O’Shea, “where you know Mum, Dad and the kids are getting to bed at a reasonable hour and getting up in time to eat three meals a day. That’s why Wilderness is seen as a golden egg for food traders.”

Wilderness is where music festival foodie culture peaks. This festival knows its audience and their stomachs. I, for one, have stumbled zombiefied through the bell tents and bunting of its family campsite, squinting in the early morning sun, trading desperate enquiries with other parents as to the earliest-opening coffee concession. At times, I would have traded my first born for a flat white and a full English.

“There are 110 street food vendors at the festival but there are also now nine restaurants,” explains Clare Isaacs, Wilderness’s food programmer. By restaurant she means two things: first, proper cooks, many of whom are famous; second, real chairs and tables set within impossibly prettily decorated tents.

Goodbye crouching over discarded cans or sinking into the mud. Hello “the Chef’s Table”, where famous names, including Lowe, will cook for groups of just 20, each of whom have forked out £100 for their meal, not including wine. In the “feasting tent”, meanwhile, you can have your lunch cooked by Petersham Nurseries, or supper from Angela Hartnett’s Café Murano for £55. It’s a long way from the original £2.30 burger.

“We’re basically setting up a restaurant from scratch in a field,” says Petersham head chef Damian Clisby. “We take more than 70 staff members. It’s a huge operation and a big challenge. People are paying high-end restaurant prices and they expect us to deliver to the same standard. We make no money — we’re lucky if we break even. We do it because the staff love it and the demographic at Wilderness is right for us, so it’s a good PR exercise.”

If all this strikes you as a heretical departure from the holy trinity of festival going — spontaneity, egalitarianism and, above all, grubbiness — it could be you who is out of step. When Wilderness put 8,500 restaurant tickets on sale this year, 5,000 sold within 45 minutes.

“In the old days, you’d go to festivals, dance all night in a field and make friends with the people around you,” says Isaacs. She believes that Wilderness’s restaurants create a similar spirit, just in a very different setting. “Ideally, the first courses will be something you have to share with the people on your table. Friendships are formed, just around a table instead of in front of a stage.”

All this sounds rather lovely. But by refusing to bow out gracefully, are oldies like me forcing festivals to change, providing us with a proper supper before we retreat at a decent hour to the (equally expensive) glamping area with its VIP loos?

The second-largest festival-going demographic is now 41- to 50-year-olds, according to the Festival Awards 2017 Market Report. The largest, however, remains 21- to 25-year-olds, and the most popular festival foods are . . . pizza and burgers. Their parents might now be able to sup on gluten-free gyoza at Glastonbury but the young are still content with the age-old formula of cheese, carbs and cheap booze.

Finding this oddly comforting, I text my 16-year-old niece for confirmation. Last summer she went to Reading Festival with 20 friends, and this year she is plotting trips to Boardmasters, Wireless and Lovebox. “Hey Flo,” I write, “what cool food trucks did you try at the festival last year?” “100% honestly?” the answer pings back: “Not a lot of food was eaten, except a cereal bar at about 10am and then at 2pm we’d go and buy the cheapest, greasiest pizza we could find.”

Follow @FTMag on Twitter to find out about our latest stories first. Subscribe to FT Life on YouTube for the latest FT Weekend videos

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2024. All rights reserved.
Reuse this content (opens in new window) CommentsJump to comments section

Follow the topics in this article

Comments