These are the 10 most important processes we need to get right when we set up new food halls. Of course, there are other important processes, especially concerning administrative work. But for the purposes of this article, I am focusing on the items that are crucial for guest-facing operations.

Restauranteurs rarely do well on their first lease negotiations. A restaurateur has spent a decade perfecting the craft of food service, but not negotiating contracts. The common wisdom is to hire a trustworthy broker and a good lawyer, but usually both of these relationships are fresh for both parties. And, the restaurateur is typically an uneducated client, making the job harder. This article is a cheat sheet for a purveyor negotiating their first commercial lease

So, you’ve opened at a food hall and are successful. How do you grow? In the past 10 years we’ve offered over 100 early-stage entrepreneurs a lower-risk restaurant debut, but even after a purveyor is successful with us, they sometimes falter on the second location. There is a pattern that boils down to a few simple things, which we are going to go over in this article.

What a trip it has been! Politan turned 10 years old earlier this month. During that decade, we have designed, built, managed, and sold food halls all over the US and internationally. What’s to come??

Are you interested in buying or selling an existing food hall?

Lately, we’ve been seeing a lot of vendor/food purveyor applicants in food halls that are attempting to mount an ultra-fast scaling strategy.

Food halls are about mutual success. If the food brand gains traction, everyone in the ecosystem benefits. After ten years and 150 concepts, we assembled these “rules of thumb”.

Way back in 2018, Cushman put out a “Food Hall Report” that contained a list of 191 existing and planned food halls (in the US). As 2023 comes to a close we thought it would be fun to check in on each of the projects (in the 2018 list) after five years to see how the industry has aged. 

I was reading an article on Linked In where real estate professionals were commenting about where they see food hall viability in mature cities for which a mature body of food hall “experience” can be witnessed.

Most retail developers want to utilize a food hall to drive consumer traffic towards a greater development project. However, many developers also want an arm’s length relationship with the daily operations of a food hall because it tends to be time-consuming and intensive.

Is a food hall right for your food brand? Possibly. In this post, we’ll walk you through the questions you should ask and assumptions you can use to build a quick back-of-the-envelope financial model to determine if a food hall location might work for you.

A developer or property owner typically seeks a food hall because it has the ability to drive thousands of shoppers to a destination thereby elevating the stature of the subject property, which, overtime, can increase the average rent psf and (hopefully) later realizes gains on the overall value of the property.