The street food sector is growing fast: NCASS registered 700 new street food businesses last year alone and our partners witness rapidly growing sectors with rising demand for support from young entrepreneurs. Yet, for all its dynamism, the sector is also becoming more crowded and ambitious young entrepreneurs are looking upwards and outwards for further growth opportunities. Viable paths to expansion include moving to fixed premises, manufacturing value added products for retail and franchising mobile units. By growing this way, street food entrepreneurs are able to create more resilient businesses with higher employment and turnover. Nevertheless, today’s street food entrepreneurs tend to be young, first time business owners and although they have developed useful skills they are often self-taught and lack formal enterprise education. Hence there is a clear argument for providing timely, tailored business training enabling them to overcome the strategic and operational challenges of scaling up. Then again, unless food entrepreneurs work in a region conducive to innovation and strategic food marketing, their efforts will be truncated. Collective action is required: local authorities and economic development stakeholders must also grasp the potential of the street food movement to evolve into a vibrant regional food scene based on high quality, local produce, accessibility and authenticity. For these reasons, Street Food: Opportunities for Regions aims to deliver high training for street food entrepreneurs to grow their businesses, at the same time as it works with HEIs and business development organizations that provide VET for the food sector, and wider economic development stakeholders to harness food SMEs as a driver of regional growth. Specifically, we will: a) Engage 50- 60 high level stakeholder organizations in 5 Regional Alliances. Together they will study the evolution of the street food phenomenon, devise and implement 5 Regional Action Plans to boost the growth of innovative food entrepreneurs and their contribution to economic development and tourism at regional level. b) Publish a “Street Food: Opportunities for Regions” Toolkit to facilitate the replication of Regional Alliances of this nature across Europe. c) Create Street Food Success: What’s Next? a course curriculum and learning materials to help street food entrepreneurs grow their businesses successfully d) Trial the course with at least 50 street food entrepreneurs in participating countries, and 25 VET trainers, then publish the course, and engage in dissemination activities and events to facilitate its inclusion in mainstream VET provision. Street Food: Opportunities for Regions has been carefully structured to generate impact for current street food entrepreneurs and the VET providers who serve them, as well as creating wider benefits for the HEI-VET community and overall regional economic development. At individual level, street food entrepreneurs who take the course are more likely to grow their businesses, moving into new markets and products with greater confidence and skills for success. Micro and small enterprises form the cornerstone of local communities and economies and so their success will contribute to a strong local food sector that is an integral part of a healthy and affordable economy. At organizational level, VET providers, especially enterprise centres and business development centres, will benefit from an immediate addition to their portfolio of training services, offering better support for a new and growing group of young entrepreneurs which are currently not catered for. Through the establishment of Regional Alliances, a wide spectrum of other stakeholders will be impacted positively, gaining greater awareness of the potential of street food to evolve into a mature and vibrant food sector and the specific policy tools and operational strategies that will enable them to achieve this. Based on this process and the commitments that each organization makes as part of the Regional Action Plan, high level stakeholders in enterprise training, economic development, tourism marketing will be better able to fulfil their organizational mission and to do so in a cost effective way (by pooling resources) which leads to a real increase in regional food identity, tourism and economic development. The permanency of the Alliance will be cemented through the sense of achievement and strong social capital generated in the project and will become a reliable means of ensuring ongoing, systemic improvements to increasing the relevancy of VET for young food sector entrepreneurs and harnessing their growth as part of overall economic development strategies region by region.
Context/background of the project The instigators of the SFOFR partnership were motivated to come together to development an Erasmus + Strategic Partnership to enable integrated action among entrepreneurship VET providers and wider economic development stakeholders to deliver high quality and support which enables street food entrepreneurs to grow professionally and contribute more fully to regional economic development. The street food sector is growing fast: with thousands of new street food businesses emerging every year in the UK alone with partners witnessing rising demand for support from young entrepreneurs. The UK government strategy Food 2030 establishes the need for “new enterprises to enter the market stimulating diversity and competition.” Yet, for all its dynamism, the street food sector is becoming more crowded and ambitious young entrepreneurs are already looking upwards and outwards for further growth opportunities. Emerging street food entrepreneurs tend to be young, first time business owners and although they have developed useful skills in branding and digital marketing, they are often self-taught and lack formal enterprise education to deal with a sometimes precarious mobile model. However, their learning comes from application, and that have the opportunity to grow quickly because, “cutting their teeth in street food allows them to trial their concept, build up a following and put together a rock-solid case for investment.” (Elite Business Magazine.) While Street Food is still a very recent phenomenon and while it is now on the radar of some VET providers and economic development stakeholders, they are largely unaware of the sector’s full potential for growth. Partners were very aware that training provision needed to include viable paths to expansion such as moving to fixed premises, launching brands for retail to franchising By growing this way, street food entrepreneurs will be able to create more resilient small businesses, moving away from the, increasing turnover and employment while keeping their brand of authenticity and contributing to regional development. And it is that regional development that the SFOFR wanted to focus on. Unless food entrepreneurs work in a region conducive to innovation and strategic food marketing, their efforts will be thwarted. OBJECTIVE The key project objective is:- “to enable integrated action among entrepreneurship VET providers and wider economic development stakeholders to deliver high quality and support which enables street food entrepreneurs to grow professionally and contribute more fully to regional economic development. SFOFR project was carefully structured to find new ways of enabling integrated action among entrepreneurship VET providers and wider economic development stakeholders to deliver high quality and support which enables street food entrepreneurs to grow professionally and contribute more fully to regional economic development. PARTNERSHIP The SFOFR partnership consists of six organizations from UK, Northern Ireland/UK, Ireland, Germany and Netherlands. Project partners have strong cross-sector reach and connectivity to the street food development sector, VET organizations, economic development agencies, agri food industry champions and an eLearning specialist drawn from profit, non-profit and public sectors spanning operational right through to policy levels. These connections were important to support the development and sustainability of IO 2 SFOFR Regional Alliances in each country and the future exploitation of the SFOFR project as a whole. MAIN ACTIVITIES a) Engaged 50- 75 high level stakeholder organizations in 5 Regional Alliances. Together we studied the evolution of the street food phenomenon, devised and implemented 5 Regional Action Plans to boost the growth of innovative food entrepreneurs and their contribution to economic development and tourism at regional level. b) Publish a “Street Food: Opportunities for Regions” Toolkit to facilitate the replication of Regional Alliances of this nature across Europe. c) Created a Street Food Success: What’s Next? a course curriculum and learning materials to help street food entrepreneurs grow their businesses successfully d) Trialed and published the course, and engaged in dissemination activities and events to facilitate its inclusion in mainstream VET provision. RESULTS 719 downloads of Toolkits in just over a year is a serious impact (surpassing the target of 580 downloads) 22 Regional Alliances meetings were held across 5 regions with a total of 186 attendees in developing Action Plans Street Food Success: What’s next ? Course Curriculum , first of its kind training course in the EU and even the world - classroom course zip file downloaded 386 times 16,518 visitors (68% of site visitors of 24,292) accessed the intellectual outputs pages 6Multiplier events attracted 272 stakeholders - important dissemination exploitation platforms.