Behind the Scenes of Food Fest Management: The Challenge of 'FestOS,' an AI-Powered OS to Solve the 'Triple Burden' of Health Departments, Vendors, and Payments

Leach Inc. (Headquarters: Tokyo, CEO: Takuya Tominaga, hereafter 'our company') is developing 'FestOS,' an AI-powered operating system specialized for managing food events and festivals.

This article will discuss the structural challenges faced by food festival and market organizers and the solutions that FestOS aims to provide.

The expanding 'food event' market and an operational structure that can't keep up

Demand for outdoor food events has rapidly recovered since the COVID-19 pandemic. Food festivals, markets, morning markets, beer festivals, and ramen shows are held every weekend across the country, and cases where local governments attract events as part of their tourism measures are increasing.

Behind this are three trends:

1. Recovery of inbound demand: 'Japanese food' ranks high as a tourist objective among foreign visitors, and food festivals that offer a condensed experience of regional food culture hold high value as tourism content. Some also point out that locally-focused food festivals can lead to higher tourist satisfaction than large restaurants.

2. Increase in 'food festivals' in the context of regional revitalization: The planning of food-centric local events, such as direct sales events for agricultural and marine products, harvest festivals in collaboration with roadside stations, and food-tasting festivals, continues to increase nationwide. However, many are run by small office teams and struggle to accumulate operational know-how for subsequent events.

3. Rapid growth of the food truck industry: The number of mobile food vendors without fixed stores has significantly increased in recent years. Due to the low barrier to entry, there is a constant stream of new sole proprietors, and the number of applicants wishing to open stalls at food festivals has surged, steadily increasing the management burden on organizing offices.

The number and scale of events are expanding. However, the operational system that supports them from behind the scenes has hardly changed in 10 years. There is a structural gap here.

Behind the glamorous main stage

Social media is flooded with photos of colorful dishes, and vendors post 'Sold out!' To attendees, a food festival is a fun part of the weekend.

However, the workload of the organizing office moving behind the scenes is hard to imagine from the outside.

📋 Main tasks of the organizing office

Individual coordination with over 100 vendors / Paperwork for health departments, which differs for each location / Sales reconciliation with a mix of multiple payment methods. It is not uncommon for a small team of only 3 to 5 people to handle all of this.

Preparations begin 2-3 months in advance, the week before the event is spent working late into the night, and reconciliation work continues for nearly a month after the event ends. At one event, it was said that over 70% of the operating staff's working hours were spent on document creation, communication, and reconciliation processing.

Three structural challenges eroding food festival management

First burden - Health department correspondence: Different rules for each municipality and the aftermath of the 2021 law revision

Vendors providing food at a food festival must, in principle, obtain a temporary business permit from the health department that has jurisdiction over the event location. This system, based on the Food Sanitation Act, is an indispensable mechanism to protect the safety of attendees.

The problem is that the requirements for obtaining a permit differ for each municipality.

In June 2021, the revised Food Sanitation Act was fully implemented, with the following changes:

- Reorganization of business permit categories (from the previous 34 categories to 32)
- Introduction of a new business notification system
- Systematization of hygiene management based on HACCP—all food business operators are now required to formulate a hygiene management plan

This revision aimed to standardize food hygiene administration, but even several years after its implementation, differences in operation remain among municipalities. As a result, a situation arises where 'the necessary procedures are different in City A and City B, even for providing the same food.'

Looking at the situation in various cities, there are differences such as:

- Tokyo: The special wards, Hachioji City, and Machida City have their own health departments, with different jurisdictions from the Tama area and island regions. The range of menus that can be offered, the types of necessary documents, and facility standards (specifications for roofs, three-sided enclosures, hand-washing facilities, water supply/drainage tank capacity, etc.) vary by health department.

- Fukuoka Prefecture: Event organizers may be required to compile the details of each vendor's stall and submit the notification forms in a batch.

- Osaka and Aichi Prefectures: Similarly, unique operational rules exist, and for organizers of nationwide touring festivals, it means starting over with rule confirmation every time the location changes.

⚠️ Pitfalls of application timing

Many health departments require applications to be submitted 2 weeks to 1 month before the event. However, for events where vendors are confirmed at the last minute, it is difficult to align with the application schedule itself. If a vendor is replaced just before the event, correction and resubmission of the submitted application forms are also necessary.

If there are 100 booths, it is necessary to accurately prepare 100 sets of documents. Many of the vendors are small-scale...