Cardiff Food and Drink Festival Event Data

Production 78 has had a connection with this event since the late 1990’s when both company Directors began working on the festival for Cardiff Council Special Events Team. Since then our relationship has developed and grown and in 2019 we were approached to make the festival more sustainable as public funding was less available to support it. As well as a site reorganisation to reduce infrastructure costs, a focus on reducing energy consumption was successful in reducing both spend as well as environmental impact.

Highlights we experienced when gathering this data included:

Attendees – As this is a free event without entry control, it is very difficult to monitor both the number of attendees, and also their methods of travel to and from the event. There is also the fact that some people will attend the event without knowing because they walk or commute through the bay every day normally, or are unsuspecting tourists who happen to coincidentally attend on the day of the event. Due to the fact that there isn’t a ticketing process at all, means we don’t have access to attendee home addresses to even make an estimated guess on travel. We work on the assumption that most attendees are local and are within an hour’s drive of the site. Many will use public transport and some will walk. A sample selection of attendees will be required in future years at this event to get a better representation of the Scope 3 data.

Exhibitors – We have much more data for exhibitors because we know who they are. Although they are booked by the local authority, many of them hire power supplies, and furniture from us for their stalls so we have a booking process that captures their addresses, and we know all of them drive to the event to deliver their stock. Non local exhibitors park up in the exhibitor car park and stay in hotels. We were therefore able to make assumptions on hotel stays based on the car parking space bookings.

Performers – As these are all bands on the stage, and they are only booked to appear on one day each, we know they all drive to and from the event on one day each.