The full story of how The Food Hub catered Laneway Festival Melbourne at a 45,000-person sellout, and what nearly stopped us before a single order was placed.
We didn't apply for Laneway Festival. We were spotted.
An organiser saw our truck at an event, loved the design and the food, and made contact. That first conversation turned into a booking. That booking turned into a relationship. And that relationship has brought us back to Laneway year after year.
It's a reminder that in this industry, how your truck looks and how your food tastes is your marketing. Every event is an audition for the next one.
Laneway Festival Melbourne is a 45,000-person sellout. That number sounds impressive from the outside. From inside a food truck, it means something very specific: you have one shot to get your systems right, because there is no quiet period to reset.
For 2025, we brought two trucks down from Sydney. Big Birdman, our Korean and Southern fried chicken truck, and our kebab truck operating as ABU Snack Packs. Between them, we deployed twenty staff on the day: eleven in Birdman and nine in ABU. Our goal was straightforward: serve the most customers, in the shortest amount of time, without compromising on quality.
We achieved it. Across all food vendors at the event, our trucks moved the most customers through the fastest. That doesn't happen by accident.
Running twenty staff at a major interstate festival requires a different approach than a local event. You can't just bring your Sydney team and hope for the best. The cost and logistics of relocating that many people don't make sense.
Our approach was to drive our core Sydney team to Melbourne in the trucks, and hire locally to fill the remaining roles. We screened a number of applicants from Melbourne, looking specifically for people with event and hospitality experience who could come up to speed fast and work to our standard under pressure.
The blend worked. Our Sydney team carried the operational knowledge and the standard. Our Melbourne hires brought local energy and commitment. When the gates opened, we had a team that knew what to do and didn't need to be managed through it.
For event organisers
This is why staff screening matters as much as truck quality. At high-volume events, the team is the product. We don't throw bodies at a problem. We build a crew that can execute.
Birdman's menu is a hybrid of Korean fried chicken and Southern American fried chicken. It's bold, snackable, and designed for exactly this kind of environment. You can eat it standing up while a band plays twenty metres away.
The biggest seller on the day? Popcorn chicken. It always is at a festival. Small pieces, big flavour, easy to walk with. At 45,000 people with short attention spans and long queues at every turn, the most accessible item on the menu wins.
Understanding that is part of how we move customers quickly. We don't just show up with a menu. We know which items to push, how to position them, and how to train staff to guide every customer to a decision fast.
We drove the trucks from Sydney to Melbourne ourselves and arrived two days before the event to set up. The early arrival is deliberate. It gives us time to troubleshoot, prep the site, and get the crew settled before the pressure is on.
It's a good thing we left the time buffer. Because when we arrived, our chicken hadn't.
We had arranged our own logistics from our Sydney supplier to deliver stock directly to Melbourne. When we got to site, the delivery hadn't arrived. No chicken. One fried chicken truck, no stock, and a 45,000-person sellout the next day.
We didn't panic. We got on the phone, found a Melbourne-based supplier who could fill the order, and had the stock secured within hours. The event ran without a single person in the crowd knowing anything had gone wrong.
That's what experience looks like in practice. Not a perfect run. Those don't exist at this scale. What matters is how fast you identify a problem, who you can call, and whether your team keeps moving while you solve it.
Why this matters to you as a client
Every large event has something that doesn't go to plan. The question is whether your caterer has the experience, the contacts, and the composure to fix it before it becomes your problem. We do.
Festival organisers, event managers, and corporate event planners all face the same core question when booking a food vendor: will they actually be able to handle it on the day?
The answer is in the track record. We have catered major public events across Australia: Vivid Sydney, Laneway Festival, the Taylor Swift and Pink concert extensions at Accor Stadium, Supanova, and more. We operate at scale because we've built the systems, the supplier relationships, and the team culture that makes it possible.
If you're planning a festival, a large corporate event, or anything that requires a caterer who has genuinely done this before, we'd love to hear about it.
Tell us about your event and we will come back to you quickly with a transparent, all-inclusive quote. We cater events across Sydney, Melbourne, and beyond.
We travel interstate
Sydney, Melbourne and beyond
Up to 45,000 guests and beyond
Festival and large-scale event experience
Problems get solved before you know about them
Laneway Festival proved it
Min. 60 guests for deployment.
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