Kickstarter

WHO ARE WE?

Ninety Nine Potatoes is the new era in a veteran food-stand family that’s been feeding summer festival-goers for over 30 years. If you’ve eaten curly french fries at Bonnaroo, Coachella, Sasquatch, Wakarusa (or many of the other big summer music festivals over the last several years), chances are you were fed by the “Curly Fry Guy”.

The Curly Fry Guy is still with us, thankfully, but times they are a changin’ and this year we’re making some MAJOR upgrades.

The ol' tent is mostly intact and ready to go... but we more youthful minded folk have some new ideas for how the food tent should be run this year. We don’t like using the cheapest foods from those giant factory meat farms. We don’t like paying our workers as little as possible to boost profit margins. We don’t want to run the same old burger stand that perpetuates the same inequalities and health problems that affect so many people. We want to do something better. We created 99 Potatoes to prove that there IS a better way.

We’re going to teach the Curly Fry Guy how we do business in the age of HD gizmos and new age vegetable mumbo jumbo.

Ultimately, we seek to greatly enhance the quality & goodness of food that hundreds of thousands of festival-goers will eat in the future, as well as bring awareness and equality back to the supply route between farms and your face. Food is such a vital part of life, yet most of us never interact with it until it’s on our plate. 99 Potatoes aims to change that mentality, and remind the world to appreciate the wonderful people and places behind our daily feasts.

The sustainable food project has been embraced by fans, bands, promoters, and bloggers at giant music festivals everywhere. It's our turn, now, to take action and show the world it can be done. People > Profits. 

Before we can change the world, however, we need a few last things to get ourselves prepared for this summer, and we’re hoping for a little help.

THE MISSION

In short, here’s what we’ll do if all goes well:

+ Restructure the old business into a new, cooperatively-run team, where all workers earn a fair share of the profits based on the true value of their input.

+ Stop ordering from corporate food distributors, who get meat from factory farms. We’ll absorb the cost increase without raising prices.

+ Actually go straight to farms in the regions where festivals are taking place and pick up fresh, humanely raised grass-fed beef and organic produce for our stand to serve.

+ Film and document the entire journey, from farm to festival, and create an ongoing web documentary to share our progress with the world, in hopes of inspiring others to join the movement.

WHERE THE MONEY GOES:


In order to accomplish these goals and keep our web series going (and awesome), we need to raise enough money to pay for:

+ A few more tiny camera gadgets that we need, (2 hard drives, spare batteries, and maybe a few flip-cams) so we can record profound & professional material that people will actually want to watch. ($1000)

+ A vehicle to support our documentary crew while on the road this summer, as well as tote our fryers and keep local foods fresh from farm to festival. We are looking at a used "toy-hauler" trailer that can accomplish all of these goals! ($6500)

+ a used diesel pickup truck to pull it ($5500) *This rig can actually pay for itself-- allowing us to avoid truck & refrigerator rentals as well as hotel rooms while we're on the road!

+ A small stipend for artists who will contribute amazing work to our upcoming documentary! Two, Aleksandra Beaucher & Paulina Suárez Vázquez, have already spent a lot of very loving time on this project, and we'd like to thank them with some overdue dinners ($750)

+ A brilliant musician to create an original sound score. What would a documentary about music festival food be without music? ($850)

+ New signs and menus to show off our local options and new website -- the big banners we hang on our stand are a bit pricey... ($650)

+ Design & Hosting for a reliable & awesome website to present our documentary series. We are filmmakers and fryers, but not great web designers, so we could use a little professional advice. Includes marketing and search optimization ($400)

+ A small mobile Internet hot-spot so we can upload video while on the road. Includes service for the summer. ($250)

+ Expensive diesel fuel, unfortunately, to move our gang from town to town as we search for and deliver better food ($500)

** Extra funds are hugely helpful too!!! Any additional funds would allow us to:**

+ Convert our truck to run on bio-fuel, used veggie oil, and/or CNG instead of expensive & polluting diesel some day!

+ Place big orders early with local butchers and give farms enough time to produce the quantity we need. Normally we work on credit from our corporate vendor, but local farmers often need cash sooner to raise their cattle and plan ahead.

+ Share our documentary with more people, and produce more episodes with higher quality content.