Any advice on having hot chips at a fundraising event?

Reader question:

Anyone thinking of having hot chips at their events?

I used to run the Clover Hill state school fair for three years from 2015 to 2017 inclusive with a lot of help from Sara Walsh. (P&c president at the time). We decided to add hot chips last year, but everyone who does it wanted 80% of the takings with just 20% back to the school. Hot chips are a great earner, but it didn’t make sense to let a third party take that much away from us when we were already selling hot food. Eventually we found Carl from the Tallai general store. He’s just done Mudgeeraba State school fair and he works much better terms than 80%. At Clover Hill we kept nearly 40% of the takings. He negotiates better rates based on how busy your event will be. Nice guy and was easy to deal with.

Here is some advice on having hot chips at your fundraising event from our Facebook community :

We do our own. We had fryers donated and hire an extra one with a warmer. We buy oil, salt, chicken salt, chip cups. The Stall Coordinators added Pluto pups and then added nuggets over time of running Stall. It’s very successful.
Totally the best way to hire in gear and do it yourself, if you’ve got people who are competent with that sort of equipment. Unfortunately, when it’s a school do you really need experienced, insured people working with hot oil as there are all sorts of nasty things can happen.
We also did our own – deep fryers all donated, also sold Pluto pups and all were very popular.
The profit margin on hot chips is so good it makes sense to do your own. We hired in two fryers for a couple of fairs and now own two of our own. Along with chips we also have a donut fryer and this year are doing hot donuts and churros.
We hire the deep fryers, get the oil donated and cook our own. We go through approx 10-12 15kg boxes of frozen chips. Everyone loves hot chips!!!

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Originally published 12 October, 2018