Starting Up with Alison Isherwood @ Thame Food Festival

The Thame Food Festival has gone from a cluster of stalls in the shadow of the town hall seven years ago to an event that now packs the historic streets of Thame with 20,000 visitors tucking into every kind of local food and drink and all-day cookery demos from national as well as home-grown chefs.

It grew out of the need to keep market towns like Thame vibrant, so we came up with the idea of having a food festival to increase visitors into the town, show what Thame had to offer, and encourage people to come back once they’d been and had a good time.

Our idea, which we fiercely uphold to this day, was to promote local food and drink, and then, as now, everything was pretty much done on a volunteer basis with a small amount of paid help to keep things ticking over. How fantastic it’s been to see the festival grow and its reputation spread. We now have the support of Raymond Blanc OBE as our ambassador, along with boundless enthusiasm from all of his team at Belmond Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons, and TV chef and writer Lotte Duncan, as our patron.

Her love of good food and their knack of getting people to do things for them have brought us some amazing talent, chefs like Adam Simmonds, Tom Kerridge, Sophie Grigson, Edd Kimber and John Whaite, who happily cook for free at the festival and are a massive draw. We’re hugely grateful to them all.

We have some incredible producers, growers and hospitality businesses on our doorstep who are truly passionate about what they do, and we work hard to stay loyal to the local ones. People like Tiddington’s Sandy Lane Farms, Thame’s What’s Cooking and Bray’s Giancarlo and Katie Caldesi, who’ve seen the importance of having the event in the town and invested hundreds of hours in making it successful. We also fight to keep stall costs affordable for local producers, and give preference to artisan food and drink businesses from within a 30-mile radius of Thame. Every single one of them has to meet strict selection criteria as well as impress the discerning palate of Lotte Duncan and her team before getting a pitch. That’s the essence and philosophy of the event and one from which we’ll never veer.

It’s been an exciting journey, but one not without its challenges. Last year, because the festival had grown again, we closed off the whole town centre for the first time. This came with a £4,000 price tag, once we’d jumped through the various legal hoops, had all the necessary signage made and put up and let local residents know.

Then, because cars were banished from town, we had to lay on a means of getting people into Thame. Keen to do it properly, we put on park-and-ride in classic London Routemaster buses to ferry people to and from the festival. Even with help from celebrity bus driver and festival compère BBC Radio 2’s Ken Bruce, that cost £1,000 per bus last year and this year we are having to lay on two extra buses to cope with demand, pushing the cost to £5,000 once we’ve organised parking and security marshals. We are also installing more loos and waste bins to cope with the extra footfall, too; at £3,000 it’s a lot for spending a penny! Being a free festival, we don’t have a revenue stream to cover these things and rely on financial support from sponsors to help cover the costs. Every year it’s a struggle financially but 2014 has been our toughest yet, with sponsorship much harder to come by.

Thankfully, sponsors like Le Manoir understand this and get behind the event with no expectation of anything in return, other than putting on a great event for the community. So too do AGA, who are covering the cost of the demo stage this year and Rectory Homes who sponsor the park-and-ride. Not to mention the great bunch of volunteers who help throughout the year and on the day itself.

They, alongside the chefs who give their time for nothing, our sponsors and all the wonderful growers and producers who line the streets on the day have made the event what it is today. Big thanks to them all, as well as to the foodies who come from far and wide on the day and leave – in the words of The Guide’s food writer Katherine MacAlister: “I’m very full and very poor!”

TRY IT
The Thame Food Festival takes place from 9am to 5pm on Saturday in Thame town centre. thameoodfestival.co.uk

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