The generators are going quiet on the festival fields, and if last week's checklist got you thinking about winter, here's the follow-up question worth asking before the van goes into storage: where does the income come from between now and Easter?

For a lot of traders the honest answer is nowhere. But there's a market that runs at exactly the time of year festivals don't — corporate catering — and most food trucks that could do it well have never been booked once.

What corporate catering actually looks like

It isn't a smaller, quieter version of a festival pitch. It's an office car park or a business park forecourt at lunchtime, a product launch in a warehouse unit, a staff Christmas party in a courtyard with a marquee over it, or a conference catering slot between sessions. The headcount is known in advance, the crowd isn't wandering past — they were told you'd be there — and nobody's queuing behind three other vans.

The money is different too. Typical UK pricing for a corporate booking runs somewhere between £8 and £25 a head depending on menu and format, with a baseline call-out fee — often £400 to £600 or more — that applies whether ten people turn up or two hundred. Most bookers expect a deposit of 20-30% to secure the date, with the balance due a couple of weeks before. None of that is festival money on a good Saturday, but it's reliable money on a Tuesday in January, which is the point.

Why companies book a van instead of a caterer

Novelty is part of it — a food truck outside the office is still a treat, not wallpaper. But the bigger reason is practical: no crockery to hire, no washing up, no serving staff to organise, and a fixed per-head cost that's easy to put through on an expenses line. A good truck genuinely solves an event organiser's problem, which is a much easier sale than persuading a stranger walking past a festival pitch to stop.

Getting in front of the people who book these

Corporate bookers mostly don't go looking at food festivals for suppliers — they search directly, or they use a booking platform built for exactly this (Roaming Hunger, Street Food Union and Poptop all list UK trucks for corporate hire). Getting a proper listing on one or two of these, with real photos and a clear per-head price range, does more for winter bookings than another festival application. The other route that quietly works: local business parks and office clusters near your usual pitches. A short, direct email to a facilities or office manager — who caters your Christmas do, would a van suit a launch event — costs nothing and most never get one.

Two things worth having ready before you pitch for this work: proof of food hygiene rating and public liability insurance, which a facilities manager will ask for before anything is confirmed, and a menu that works standing up in an office car park in December — hot, fast, one-handed, no cutlery faff.

Where pre-order ordering earns its keep

A corporate booking is one of the few times you know your customer count and roughly when they'll all arrive at once — the classic 12:30 lunch rush from one building. Sending a QR ordering link ahead of time so the office can order before they walk down means the queue that would otherwise form in five minutes flat never happens, and the kitchen screen is already filling with tickets before the first person reaches the hatch. It's the same ordering flow that works at a festival, just aimed at fifty desks instead of a field.

The timing that matters right now

Christmas party bookings for corporate clients are mostly locked in during October and November, not December — by the time the party's a fortnight away, the calendar's usually full. If winter income matters, the next few weeks are when to start sending emails and finishing platform listings, not after the van's already parked up for the season.

Parking up for winter doesn't have to mean parking your income too. It just means chasing a different calendar for a few months.