I ran food markets for eight years. This is what I learnt

Six am. My phone pings. “Can I have a spot out of the sun, towards the end of the bridge, away from the street food queues and preferably not near that cheese woman?”

Standing on Armstrong Bridge in Newcastle, I quickly try to rejig the market plan to suit. This is hard because other texts have started rolling in. “I’ll be late.” “My fridge isn’t working.” “Is it windy?” “I’ve forgotten my weights.” I remove my gloves and start to sketch out a new floor plan as the first few drops of rain pattern the paper.

Early in my career shift from architecture to food I took it upon myself to set up and run several local markets in Newcastle. I was driven partly by a passion for local food and the incredible producers who make it, but it was also a useful precursor to opening a restaurant as it gave me a black book of growers and makers that I still work with today. Although the markets were never my main job (I was already working as a chef), they were, like most side hustles, almost as much work. I was marketer, booker and health and safety officer. I distributed the bins at dawn.

June is one of the best months for visiting markets. It marks the end of the “hungry gap”, the time after the last winter vegetables have been lifted and before the start of the new harvest. The sun is out and traders seem reinvigorated. For me, it’s also a time to catch up on new trends in a world I used to know inside out — and to reflect on what I learnt from my years wrangling fussy traders and chaotic queues.

First, the customer is quick to judge, so it’s important to pique their interest with a bit of theatre. One local restaurant that regularly attended my markets presented its larder with such finesse — huge piles of adorned meringues, glistening golden pies — that they would often sell out in the first couple of hours. My favourite fruit and vegetable farm would bring a full-sized vintage wooden market cart, overflowing with fresh bunches of herbs and cauliflowers the size of your head.

I focused on stalls selling things that a shopper would struggle to find in a supermarket: freshly baked bread, local tomatoes and strawberries, smoked kippers, warm pretzels, homemade fruit sodas. I discovered that it’s best to mix up the expensive stalls with the cheaper ones and to alternate fresh produce with the treats, balancing needs and wants. Most people come to a market with a plan of what they need (something for lunch, say) but they leave with more. The smell of a warm custard tart is too hard to resist.

Quality control is important. I would visit people’s stalls at other markets, or they would drop things off for me to try in advance. Most were delicious. Not all. I remember unwrapping the banana leaf of one vegan tamale and finding grey sludge inside. I learnt from the difficult conversation that followed that it was better to simply say the market was “fully booked” than to offer honest feedback.

In the UK, the weather hangs over the market trade every week: too hot and the fresh food suffers, too cold and the traders suffer, too wet and the public suffer. But stall holders are a hardy bunch who will tough out pretty much anything. And you would be surprised how many northerners will brave the rain for a doughnut and an artisanal sausage roll.

I lived in particular fear of the wind. A flying tent at a crowded event is best avoided. I recall one afternoon standing in a field as the reading on my anemometer reached 40mph and flaky pastry flew through the air, while enterprising traders continued to sell bars of chocolate from the boots of their vans.

If you get a queue, you keep a queue. I knew a street food trader who would get friends and family to form a line just to get them started and then they would be off. But beware the line of a popular neighbouring stall. I remember spotting a lady selling macarons, puce in the face, as hordes of students queued across the front of her beautifully presented stall waiting for their halloumi fries from next door. I redirected the queue and watched her blood pressure subside.

Corporate food markets might charge stall holders hundreds of pounds to attend. I charged in the region of £40, so a small business selling 300 doughnuts at £3 each could make a decent amount of money. Although it’s rare to make a fortune from markets, that doesn’t stop people from trying. It’s not unheard of for the unscrupulous of the food world to think they can capitalise on affluent market-then-brunch types who’ll buy anything out of a vintage wooden fruit crate.

This means that a market operator needs to be something of a detective. I remember a man from Cumbria who was adamant that he made every sausage roll himself just down the road. Scrutinising his packaging (and a little online investigation) eventually led me to the source: a factory in a business park outside Carlisle serving garage forecourts countrywide.

Chancers aside, why do traders bother with the hassle of markets? Many see them primarily as good incubators. It is a way of saving up capital for a new business that isn’t yet tied to high wages and rents, plus you can test the market — literally. New trends come at you quick and en masse: square pizzas, pre-batched cocktails, unusual nut butters and more single-origin local coffee roasteries than I could count. My inbox would often be full of new businesses whose identical products I’d never even heard of a few weeks prior. Two fresh juice producers using waste supermarket fruit cropped up in one week.

I think ultimately market traders do it for the same reason I did. Warring crêpiers and territorial sausage makers aside, it’s a community: full of support, gossip, drama and, at its heart, brilliant food and produce. It’s a delicious slice of life and passion and I miss it — although I do not miss rearranging trestle tables at 5am.

Anna Hedworth is the chef-proprietor of Cook House & Long Friday in Newcastle

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