Food Hall operators are typically the entrepreneur in between the real estate and the food purveyor. The real estate owner wants a food hall but doesn’t want to operate it. Food purveyors want to rent stalls but don’t want to deal with anything outside their own brands. A food hall operator steps in to fill the gap by running the business of the food hall.

The pandemic initially affected food halls similarly to full service restaurants. They were largely viewed as crowded spaces of high risk. While that period came and went, post-pandemic food halls have evolved in a few key ways. That’s what we’ll talk about in this article. If you’re considering building a shared F&B operation and want to be current on trends, this article is for you.

Food halls are a great option for certain types of business owners and not for others. This article looks a little deeper into the types of entrepreneurs that thrive in food halls.

The first thing to consider when planning seating for a food hall is how long you want the customer to spend at the hall itself. Do you want the hang time to be over 45 minutes? Do you want people to go there for dates, business meetings, or family outings?

Food halls are destination retail establishments that also offer convenience factors. Optionality is the ultimate convenience and this where Food Halls excel as a draw. Once open, the hospitality, aesthetic, and food quality affirm a guest experience that keeps customers coming back.

Rental structures in food halls are pretty straightforward. They have all the same tools as normal rental structures with a few simple differences.

When setting up the internal economy of a food hall, one thing we see often is a lot of confusion on “what is shared?” And, “what is mine?” This has multiple variants, such as “what do I clean?” And, “what do you clean?” And, the all important, “What do I buy?" and “What do you buy?”

What is the appropriate tech stack for food halls? Well, let’s start with the fundamentals. Buckle-up, we’ll try to be brief, but there is some serious ground to cover…

Overtime, we realized that the experience of opening a food hall is more about the psychology of new experiences. Our ability to give better experiences was rooted in our ability to communicate those outcomes in advance. At any rate, as we made it through openings three and four, we realized that not only were the experiences of the vendor-partners more similar than different, there were also defined stages of the opening experience. Further, the first year experience always has the same stages, which are contextually triggered by slight shifts in sales volumes.

We’ve done a lot of work (and customer interviews) around this subject to improve our working experience over many years. As a long-term operator in the industry, we’ve focused on how to make the services we offer most efficient for the underlying food vendors. To begin, it’s important to boil down the goals of a vendor and then to work backwards. The top five goals of a food hall vendor, in order of popularity, have been…

Over the course of 2022 (and likely into 2023), we’re going to publish every lesson we’ve ever learned about the food hall business on our website in around 100 articles. Our goal in doing this is to build a knowledge-base for the industry that is readable and searchable—to improve transparency, conversation, and overall knowledge of the inner-workings of great food halls. And yes, we’ll still consult, but our goal in consulting is to minimize costs and vet real projects (to focus on the applications of this knowledge)—In the end, we love building and operating compelling spaces with partners. For 2022, we decided that giving away “the findings” of our industry is the best (shortest) route to great operating partnerships.

A great consumer flow plan is focused on how a customer shops the environment. It will seek to find the perfect balance of aesthetic and function. If it does a good job, customers will use the space with more frequency, spend more money, and talk about the space independently to their friends. If it does a poor job, you will notice that customers talk about how they visit the location in certain circumstances where the experience is easiest for them. They will say things like, “I go there in the mid afternoon when it’s slow and I can get in and out easily,” or “I try to shop that vendor’s other location, because I feel like it’s easier.” Invariably comments will focus on polite alternatives to visiting the desired destination.