With the third annual Black Food Truck Festival forthcoming later this month, the founding architect of the eagerly-anticipated celebration recently commented on its rapid growth, as a projected 15,000-plus people are expected to attend on the weekend of April 26.
What started out as a gathering of about 5,000 individuals in the Charleston Battery soccer stadium in Mount Pleasant has turned into a multigenerational and multicultural outdoor gala at the Exchange Park Fairgrounds in Ladson. The two performance acts that appeared at the inaugural Black Food Truck Fest have quadrupled in quantity, along with an additional eight-10 disc jockeys that will be playing an assortment of music genres, according to Marcus Hammond.
“We’ve got everything from the diaspora to Gullah Geechee to soul food, seafood, Charleston staples like the chewies, Gullah rice and red rice,” rattled off the Memphis native, who first came to Charleston as a basketball player on scholarship for the College of Charleston. One look at the Lowcountry palmetto trees, he quipped, was enough for him to make the Holy City his forever home.
Since then, the 39-year-old entrepreneur worked for several years as a relationship manager in the banking industry. But since his Black Food Truck Festival caught fire after its first iteration, Hammond has shifted gears by now pouring his efforts into planning for the festival year-round.
The popularity of the Black food and music themed event, he said, will bring in a slew of out-of-state visitors this year. In fact, he estimated that about 84 percent of attendees will be trekking in from outside the Tri-County area, from places like Atlanta, Charlotte, Jacksonville and even Washington D.C.
When asked what he’s learned from being the orchestrator of the burgeoning festival, Hammond stated: “Two things that have really guided me, [with] the first one being the customer is not always right, but the customer is always first. So, everything we do with the festival, we keep the attendees in mind first.
“And something similar to that is that we do everything that we can to please every attendee that comes through the doors. We do our best to make sure everybody is safe, and we do our best to make sure that everybody has a good time. We aim for that perfection knowing that we’ll fall short. But it’s always our aim.”
Some of the special crowd-pleasing activities at this year’s festival will include a “Rhythms & Booze” opening party, The Melanin x BFTF AM Workout and a Saturday Night “Trappyoke” Afterparty.
“Those are tweaks that we have made seeing the data that a lot of people came here from out of town. So, [it’s] what we wanted to do [with] Charleston being No. 1 in tourism hands down throughout the country for more than the last decade. But oftentimes, when we see those tourist attractions, they’re not always guided toward Black-curated events. So, what we wanted to do is change the narrative from people thinking of the deep south, old Charleston, to being able to come to Charleston for a full weekend and experience Black culture and Charleston, curated by Black people.”
To find out more about the 2024 Black Food Truck Festival, visit https://www.blackfoodtruckfestival.com/.
