Autumn Time

Well that was a huge few months! 

Time for a little update. 

 In no particular order here are some amazing experiences Veggie Velo has had in the past few months:

• The Big Day Out, Adelaide. That. Was. Huge.

• Barrio for the Adelaide Festival. Great fun, great food, great people! (I’d be surprised if many of our customers remember what they ate for dinner though, 6 bars in full swing can really get the party going!)

• Fork on the Road, Adelaide, support for this event is of mega proportions. Thank you to everyone who came and bought a veggie burger! 

• Scum Fest. Yep, it was different for us, but the customers were lovely and made our stay at the Old Queens Theatre awesome. 

• ‘Oi You’ Art exhibition opening at the Adelaide Festival Centre, we were so impressed at the number of people who came along to support this festival. Excellent turn out, and a great chance to meet Tash and co. from the Annexe at Glenelg, our Veggie fix at the bay. 

• Mini Maker Faire Adelaide, lovely day of learning new things, and meeting nice people, what more could we ask for? 

• World Vegan Day Festival. Well next time we will certainly bring more food! 

• And last but not least our regular street side service. It’s going well, so many smiling faces and supportive customers- Thank you! Hindmarsh Square, North Terrace, Leigh Street are our favourites and we can’t wait to meet you all! 

We are still amazed by the huge response to us, and the mobile food vendors of Adelaide in general. It gives us such a positive feeling about the future of Adelaide, a city we feel so happy to be living in! We feel like the people of Adelaide are realising that to cause change they need to be active in making it happen, and that sitting back and appreciating something that’s going on is not enough, you need to be a part of it for it to work. We really believe that as more people are travelling around the world they are not only appreciating what they have here in Adelaide, but are more open to new ideas, and want to bring some of those ideas home. We regularly get people saying they’ve seen vending bicycles in Asian, Europe or America and understand what we are about. It so nice!
There really seems to be a buzz of new activity in Adelaide, a momentum we hope continues, and we really want to be a part of that positivity. 
Before I leave you with some photos from our adventures, I just wanted to make special mention of the charity group Fauna Rescue of South Australia Inc. During the Adelaide Festival we spent one night raising money for this group. It was just a little drop in the ocean of what we would like to do long term, but it was really rewarding. We raised $150 in one night just by donating a percentage of our sales to them. We know that money will go towards feeding animals in recovery, funding vet bills and creating nurturing environments for animals in need of assistance. So good! Thanks to everyone who came and supported us on this (and every) night, and made this possible. Thanks to Robyn Wood from the Fauna Rescue group for helping us organise this! 

The End of Summer Fridays

A lot of bread for the Big Day Out

Set up for the Big Day Out the night before

Behind the scenes

North Terrace, little bicycle food court.

Scum Fest 2013

Staff meals

North Terrace is a perfect spot!

Before at Barrio

Setting up, Thanks Mum & Dad for the help!

Fitting right in at Barrio

Barrio

Hindmarsh Square

Festival Centre

Oi You Exhibition Opening Set Up

Uni S.A

Leigh Street

The end of October...Already

Hello Veggie Lovers! 
October is almost over and we are now seriously starting to cook! 

What a great few weeks we have had, meeting you all at plant swap meets, in Adelaide’s park lands, Gilles Street Market and today in the University for the first time. 

The Veggie Velo has been clocking up some miles and Manu has been working into overtime. 

We had a great morning on International ride to work day, with our first try at something different off the grill, Corn Fritters (vegan) and Banana Pancakes (vegan also). They were super good and hopefully we can do a little breakfast service some time in the future.

In the past few weeks we have also traveled to Woodville to be part of a friendly Garden open day at Ridley Grove Community Garden, took part in the city Park(ing) Day and worked the crowd for the march to Solar Power up our state. We even had a pop up park in the East end to help celebrate Irving Baby's 20th (!!) anniversary. Thanks Splash adelaide for the deck chair vibe.

We are learning that now we have a lot more sun we need to take cover in the shade, so some of our favourite spots like North Terrace will be moving during summer. We met some great Veggie Burger fans at this spot so hopefully we can find somewhere shady near by.

We are also now certain we have the best customers in the world. Not only are you all friendly and patient, you have been giving us amazing feedback and reviews as well. We are sincerely grateful for all of your business and hope we keep you well fed and happy for some time yet.

Yelp welcomes Veggie Velo to its pages. Thank you for liking us!

One highlight of the past few weeks was meeting and serving Simon Bryant. Ever cooked for a chef? It can be a little nerve racking, but Simon was very friendly and came and complimented Manu and even gave us some beautiful produce from his ‘Dirty’ range, Lentils and Chickpeas. We are now fans of those as well. Simon is a champion of ethical produce and we are lucky to have him in Adelaide. 

 Who knew you could get lentils from Kangaroon Island?

We were also happy to finally meet the Kind Cleaner, who came and introduced himself. Paul is not only doing kind cleaning he is doing great blogging, and we love his regular posts. We know the food industry can go a long way to be more environmentally friendly, and this blog is a little inspiration for us! 

Be inspired by a kind Adelaidean here.

We have met so many great people through this business, maybe I can work out a little blog special on all of you? 

So, what’s coming up for the Velo in the lead up to 2013?

Quite a lot. 

For starters Manu is doing work on the bicycle. Let’s be honest. It could be a bit lighter! It weighs a couple of hundred kilos and every little bit counts, so some weight loss is taking place.
 
Then we are excited to be involved with Summer Fridays in the East end. Every Friday night from November 16th we will be in Ebenezer Place, with a great group of traders. 

 Here we come Ebenezer on Fridays!

We are promoting cycling a little more by being involved with Tour de Work. This is going to be great, and hopefully you are already involved. If not, finish reading this blog post and go online and get involved! 

Click here to see what's happenin'

World Vegan Day! Of course we will be there. Its still to be confirmed but keep the 18th November free and be ready to eat your way from one side of the park to the other. Lots of stalls and of course Veggie Velo vegan burgers. We will be doing a trial run of a new vegan burger patty to allow choice for our fans, very exciting! 

Veggie Velo is also going to be flipping burgers at a new market in Adelaide called ‘Damn the Man Night Market’. We’re not sure which man they want damned but we’ll be there to see. It’s in the beautiful Old Queens Theatre in the west of the city, on Thursday night 22nd November. 

Find out more here, then come along to see us please!

Gilles Street will be wedging us in too, between James and his amazing Smooth Revolution, Pedal powered smoothies (and some lady who sells knick -nacks normally). Gilles Street is a great environment for us, lots of good tunes from the dj and lots of happy faces. 

Subtle promotion of our friend Jame's page here, these smoothies are seriously good!

After all that we will be rolling into some parks about the city. We would like to try the west a little more, and would love to try Leigh street, Light square and Whitmore Square.

One more thing! Manu was filmed for a little special on ABC t.v. It will be on the 7:30 Report, as a story about street vending. Erin, part of our Veggie Velo support crew was charming the camera and she and Manu we interviewed for the segment. Go veggie power go! 

So we hope to see you soon on the street. Thanks again for keeping us going, we appreciate each of you, and your veggie loving ways. 

As always, check our facebook page and our calender and maps to find us. 

Thanks guys, love your veg! 
Monica, Veggie Velo support crew

The Sun is Out!

Here we are just completing our first month! Woo hooo! Very happy we are certainly underway, operating and getting into the swing of things. 

We had a beautiful weekend of Veggie Velo life, with a successful day trading on North Terrace on Friday (thanks to Darren for getting the replacement gas bottle, oops, and to the lovely customers who didn’t throw alfalfa sprouts at us when we ran out of gas) then a sunny day in Hindmarsh Square, followed by an evening service on Ebenezer place in front of Treadly Bike store.

In the last couple of weeks we have served a really diverse range of customers, all of which have been an absolute pleasure to deal with, making us smile from sun up to sun down. We were happy to be at the Focus Cycle cross event in the Adelaide park lands in the past week also and discovered a little night life while trading on Ebenezer place for the first time. Excellent! 

And in the past fortnight we received our first reviews! (or at least write ups). Rip it up put an article in the paper about us (SO GOOD!) and now we feel a little more like Adelaide is getting used to seeing us around, even if people still stare when we ride by. 

We also had a nice photographer from the 'Adelaide Matters' magazine stop by to take some photos of Manu. Looking forward to that one!

 

Click here for the S.A great website write up!

Looking forward to summer and extending our trading days and hours. It’s going to be fantastic! Its such a pleasure to work standing on the street with our customers, rather than being behind a counter for example. We get to chat to our customers and LOVE hearing their ideas, comments and questions. 

  
Thanks to everyone who lets me take their photo. It makes our day that we get to see your happy faces!

Lately the more common questions have been… “Do you actually ride that here?” We take it as a compliment that we look like a little shop rather than a mobile bicycle, but yes Manu actually rides his shop to work! Here is my (so far) only video of him on the go. 

 And a few action shots...

 (The above one is Dan Kouriah making it look easy!)

 Below is a photo of my Dad on Manu's vintage Dutch cargo bike, showing us how its done. (Tweed ride 2012). Cargo bikes are beautifully designed and are easy to ride. The 'Manumobile' as its becoming known, is really really heavy. As its the first he's designed he's had to experiment and use trial and error, but overall its a heavy beast. We estimate its well over 100kgs (maybe around 200kgs) when loaded in the morning and its tough pushing it up even a little hill. Manu is always dreaming up improvements and even a new bike in the future, and it will keep getting easier.

Questions like “Where will you be next Wednesday, and can you come to Victoria Square?”  are also common.

The answer is soon we will be extending our trading days to more than just 2 per week. We will always update our blog and facebook page to let you know where we will be each week. And yes we will come to Victoria square, we are currently working out when, but soon! 

We are busy planning other awesome locations as well, and will soon be putting them on the map! 

So that’s this little blog post summed up, our life is quite full of Veggie Velo at the moment and we love it. All the support from everyone makes us feel grateful to live in such brilliant city, and to be serving such great customers. 

Thank you all so much!