Since 2014, the Street Food Festival has created a space for coming together to experience street food in an exhilarating market environment. Now, to advance this food journey, the culinary-minded experience designers at Studio H will introduce the first-ever Visa Food Studio, a full-day food event filled with interactive talks, business insights, workshops and fantastic food. The conference will take place on Thursday 31 August, two days before the Street Food Festival in Cape Town, in Workshop 17 at the V&A Waterfront.

The conference will kick off at 8.30am with breakfast and coffee before starting with the first speakers, Sarah Keough and Tommy Werner from Put A Egg On It. They will talk about their New York City zine, founded in 2008, which focuses on food, cooking and eating communally with friends and family. Next you will hear from Dutch speaker Ruby van den Broek, the creative designer at Instock. Instock is a food surplus restaurant, where produce that would usually be discarded is turned into delicious meals. At the moment Ruby is also developing a website to educate youth about food wastage. Other speakers include Sascha Landshoff, founder of Dutch companies JJBL, De TostiFabriek and Coco Conserven. They work on food conservation and sustainability in unique and innovative ways.

Two of the speakers at Visa Food Studio, Andy Fenner and Wesley Randles. Photo supplied.

After lunch the workshops will begin, with Josh de Kock from Weekly Wors taking the lead. Josh is known for his journey to invent a new sausage every week for a year. He’ll be followed by Margot Janse, formerly of the award-winning restaurant The Tasting Room at Le Quartier Français, who is involved with the Isabelo Project. The Isabelo Project creates and delivers nutritious muffins to 70 school children in Franschhoek every week. Next on the line-up will be Wesley Randles and Andy Fenner of Convivium, which is a food-focused event held every year in the hopes of closing the gap between the earth and the meal.

Other workshops will be hosted by Zayaan Khan from Food Civic and Bertie Coetzee from Lowerland, and there will also be a live reading of Chips! excerpts. You’ll get a chance to chat to the professionals as well as your fellow attendees over drinks afterwards.

The event will run from 8.30am until 6.30pm and tickets cost R1500 each, available via WebTickets. You can check the website streetfoodfestival.co.za/conference for a full programme and more information on each speaker.