With the Strawberry Festival continuing to draw record numbers of attendees annually, local food vendors Hannah and Jackson Chambers have expressed concerns over a new vendor fee for food trucks.
On Monday, May 8, Cullman Parks and Recreation and Sports Tourism Director Nathan Anderson updated the Cullman City Council on the success of the May 6 weekend event, which continued its trend of surpassing the previous year’s attendance records. Anderson said the department estimated visitors from 17 states accounted for 17,000 of the festival’s 27,000 attendees, resulting in about $3 million in economic impact for the city.
Apart from the 40 local businesses Anderson said were inside the event’s perimeters, he noted that discussions with brick-and-mortar retailers and restaurant owners reported the crowds provided for several record high revenue days.
The Chambers, who own The Street Kitchen food truck, also addressed the council, saying they felt the increased growth of the festival had resulted in local vendors being edged out of participation after learning of a new revenue-sharing style fee placed on food vendors. Because of this, they started a petition — which as of Friday, May 12, had received more than 800 signatures — requesting CPRST to either lower the rate for local vendors or revert back to previous years’ flat rate.
“As a local vendor, we don’t feel as though we were welcome to our hometown’s biggest festival,” Hannah said. “At 20% to 30% [referencing an early, unofficial version of the contract before fees were revised to 20-25%] of our gross sales we would pay anywhere from $1,000 to $3,000. The way, this set up penalizes vendors for making more money.”
President of the Alabama Food Truck Association, Edgar Walker, said he has been advocating for the use of this type of percentage based fee, but felt as though the 25% of gross sales fee for the Strawberry Festival was steeper than the rate he is willing to provide when attending similar- or larger-sized festivals. Instead, Walker said he “goes to God” to determine his standard rate of 10%.
“I ask them, When you go to church, how much of your gross do you put in the plate? So, I ask how they feel trying to make me pay more than I pay to God,” Walker said.
Unlike other festivals drawing similar crowds, Anderson said the Strawberry Festival doesn’t have the luxury of reducing fees if it is to continue to not impose any kind of admission fee.
“It is our goal to hold on for as long as we can to a free admission and give people the option to bring in outside food,” Anderson said. “And I promise, even if you don’t spend a dime, it’s going to be a fun experience. You’re going to enjoy it.”
Anderson provided background to CPRST’s involvement with the festival which began when the event was passed along to the department from the Oktoberfest Committee in 2017. Attendance had been experiencing a downward spiral for several years and the department questioned if the event would be able to continue, but were informed that abandoning the event was not an option.
“Strawberry fest was already an established brand that a group of people were no longer able to financially support … because they wanted to focus on Oktoberfest [the weeklong Oktoberfest has also been passed onto CPRST] so we had no other choice because we were told, we were mandated, by the farmers and the council — it’s not an option to let it die,” Anderson said.
Instead, he and his team at the time, began to look for ways to revitalize the event by introducing musical acts to retain the crowds’ attention through the evening hours and attract more visitors from surrounding areas.
“When you can generate revenue from outside, that’s the gold standard for communities,” Anderson said.
Anderson said CPRST locked onto what they believed was a winning formula in 2019 by booking the nationally recognized act Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. With buzz surrounding the festival successfully generated, Anderson — who drew from his experiences organizing events with CPRST and the private sector — said the department now had to develop a plan for the festival to sustain itself on a “shoestring budget.”
“If we cut back, it dies. I can promise you it will bomb so fast it will be one of the greatest tragedy festival stories in our immediate area you have ever heard of. You can’t go backwards in the festival world; if we did, we would be right back where we started in 2017,” Anderson said.
Apart from a $20,000 contribution from the City of Cullman, Anderson said the festival is primarily funded through sponsorships and revenue generated by the festival itself, which has historically resulted in a loss of revenue. In 2022, expenses for the event came in at about $180,000 and generated less than $140,000. While the event impacts the entire community, Anderson said he believes the festival is able to sustain itself without needing to detract from any other municipal programs.
“This festival doesn’t take anything away from our community and it’s our goal to keep it that way. That money comes from somewhere, somebody is giving up something to fund a festival that is by nature, good enough to fund itself. … Don’t we, as trustees of taxpayer dollars owe it to those taxpayers to run it in a smart and self-sufficient way? If the industry operates for profit, why can’t we find a way to come up with a hybrid solution to cover the cost,” Anderson said.
While final numbers are continuing to trickle in, preventing Anderson from providing any definite totals, he estimates the department was able to shrink last year’s deficit by around $30,000 through the newly applied food vendor fees and the sale of around 500 VIP tickets, which provided access to exclusive seating areas during the evening’s musical performances.
Concerns about several other items within the vendor contract are also mentioned in the petition, such as granting CPRST access to vendor point of sale systems, requesting menu approval and offering price suggestions. While Anderson acknowledged the “black and white” nature of the legal contract, he said these stipulations did not need enforcing, and were simply a way to provide a certain level of legal protection to the department and a sense of fairness to the vendors.
“We never set anybody’s prices,” Anderson said. The confusion surrounding this particular item came from Anderson’s suggestion to vendors to “build that vendor fee into their menus” by adding an additional $1-$2 into certain items, which would bring pricing more in line with festival norms.
Hannah Chambers said she understood this point, and would be comfortable doing so at a paid event, which she said provided a decent indicator that the guests were willing to pay a little higher prices — but found it hard to come to terms with doing so at an event designed to entertain entire families.
“That’s just not what we’re about, it’s not what really matters to us. If we raised our prices to $15 or $16 dollars and somebody has an entire family of five they need to feed, that starts to add up really quickly,” she said.
Anderson said the response he has received from the vendors, present during the 2023 festival, had been overwhelmingly positive. Joe Brown, owner of one of the two local vendors, Devil Dawgs, declined to provide details to the specifics of his contract with CPRST or ways it affected his revenue for the day, but didn’t seem to have any negative thoughts.
“Overall we had a great day. I’m excited for next year and will definitely want to go back,” he said.
On May 10, Anderson invited the Chambers and the owners of Stone’s All Fired Up and Chat and Chew to a meeting with the goal of starting a more open dialogue and try to find a solution to benefit all parties involved. While both Anderson and the vendors agree that details still need to be ironed out, Chambers said she feels as though things were moving in a positive direction and a follow up meeting with more vendors is being planned to take place in the future.
“I’m really glad we had that meeting. I don’t have anything negative to say about them, we just felt like we wanted to be heard and let them know how this effects us. I think this gave us a good way to communicate, so we’ll see how everything goes,” Chambers said.