HONKing Madness / VegFest
Folks, it's been an incredible week here in Austin. We did our best to cram in as much office and repair work during the weekdays as possible before HONK! TX started in town last Thursday, and it has been a trip. For those who don't know, Moni (below pic, center) plays with four brass bands here in Austin, and she must have performed at least twenty sets in the last three days during the festival, which featured tons of live music and a parade of street bands from all over the US (and one from Russia!).
Of course, between going out to show my support for her and the HONK family, I've been working on moving things along for the business! In addition to the less-than-exciting readjustments of moving to a new state (talking to phone robots about insurance), I finally earned my Texas Food Manager Certification on Saturday! This brings me into my first official management position, and after so many years working in food service, I couldn't be more excited to be designing my own workplace. :)
Luckily for me, my work also included a visit to VegFest on Saturday, a free festival celebrating all aspects of the plant-based lifestyle.
Colorful displays surrounded the grassy pathways through Pan Am park, with vendors showing off their clothes, coffees, jewelry, jams, soaps, shoes, and more.
Health and wellness experts from across the city touted the benefits of their plant based diet plans, while aromas of curry, fries, and ice cream danced around in the breeze. I couldn't resist a giant plate of stewed Ethiopian peas, cabbage, collards, carrots, potatoes, and lentils with injera bread!
My favorite booths, of course, were the dessert stands. Sweet Ritual had 20+ people waiting to sample their delightful ice creams, and Bananarchy also drew quite the crowd, with their sugar-punk menu posters.
If there is one thing I took away from visiting VegFest, it's that the lines for vegan frozen desserts were significantly longer than just about everything else (other than Arlo's, a vegan burger truck). I am 100% certain that when we run a booth at VegFest next year, it will be a sensational hit!
Now that we are all partied out, this week we will be getting serious about Kickstarter reward production (ongoing), hiring more contractor friends to help renovate our trailer, and working with our new equipment in our test kitchen to continue designing/pricing our product and menu.
More AMAZING developments coming next week!
