Buy cheap, buy twice! This is pretty much the mantra of most street food traders. We’ll be going through equipment, step by step. Gas or electric, what brands are good and what’s good value for money.

Trading with an electrical setup is generally simple and easy. However, being reliant on electricity does have some major drawbacks, especially at street food markets. Outdoor power sources are notoriously unreliable.

Hotdog Jedi Joel Bowen has bought and sold pretty much every piece of catering equipment over the last few years. His stock-in-trade are griddles, fryers and bain maries and to be honest that’s probably what 75% of traders use anyway.

Your suppliers are a huge part of your business. You discover them and bring them together and it gives life to your food. You need to make sure you look after them as they can be the difference between a good dish and a great one.

Working out the amount each portion of your food will cost is not easy but essential for you to work out how much you should charge and where you should trade. Establishing these early on will help you save time, money and resources.

Running a street food business is hard work, and regardless of how much planning you do, until you actually start you won’t know what the day-to-day running of the business looks like. You will need to develop systems for how to get everything you need in one place ready to trade. You need to keep working to make this system as simple as possible.