Food festivals and covert customer choices

Food festival season is upon us. Are you ready to capture customer spend?

We’re in the midst of food festival season and there are now over 90 to choose from in the UK this Summer.?

There’s something primal about mingling amongst stalls hunting down new flavours and gathering basketfuls of seasonal produce.?

As a nation of nosh lovers, fairs are crammed with attractions from Celebrity Chef Masterclasses to bake-offs and seminars on all things foodie from foraging to sustainable food systems. Stalls are a feast for the eyes with their artistic displays of rustic bread, cheeses, seafood, jams, chutneys, beers, flavoured gins and wines.

The Wakefield Rhubarb Festival kicked off the season in late February. It was a delight. The warm weather attracted the crowds with the mask free freedom of fresh air and food. Rhubarb featured in cakes, cookies, pork pies, pickles and even a fabulous pink liqueur “Rhucello”.

If you’ve never been to one, it’s a bit like speed dating with food. A nibble or sip of something that takes your fancy and a natter about how it’s made.

As I navigated the stalls, already clustered with customers eager to sample foodie delights, it was clear to see hold ups with small payment devices. Then the chit chat of stall holders to cover the delay. Best jokes. The weather. The next in line, fidgeting and wondering if it was worth the wait.?

I must admit, I did it myself, eager at first to sample the produce but impatient to be served, I wandered off to neighbouring stalls that seemed to be managing their queues better.?

There’s a phenomenon at play here that psychologists, marketeers and mathematicians have studied known as “queue theory”. Customers leave queues because they don’t want to wait and we know that instinctively. They silently decide to walk away and shop elsewhere without explaining or justifying it. A host of studies have analysed this behaviour in depth.

We get itchy feet for all manner of reasons: boredom, the number of people ahead in the queue. When an item catches the buyer's eye and is perceived as non-essential, perhaps a treat, buyers make mental trade-offs and assess the value of the item to them relative to the amount of hassle to get it. In today’s complex Covid world, personal space now plays a part in this subliminal decision making. Nowadays, many perhaps also evaluate the additional risk of standing in line next to someone potentially carrying the virus.

The instant gratification of buying that homemade cake, bottle of organic wine or jar preserves may just fizzle out if the payment system isn’t performing on par with customer expectations.

As a stall holder, the customer that leaves the queue may never return, as the cash in their wallet gets spent elsewhere.

So a card machine that’s processes in seconds, doesn’t play up or involve fiddling around with a second device such as a phone, can help to keep queues to a minimum. In the eyes of the customer making split second evaluations of which stall to visit, simply seeing efficient service may mean they favour your stand over another selling similar items. Or indeed, if the customer is merely looking for the instant buzz of buying something for buying's sake, they may just disappear in search of something else that catches their attention.

If you're a stall holder, the good news is that there is a solution to help you keep your queues on the move. Fast grown up, contactless 4g machines with flexible contracts are here and if you'd like to know more, feel free to give me a call on +44 (0) 7472 583002.