As The Not Dogs Summer Tour ends... A Look to the Future!

As our Not Dogs Summer tour comes to an end, we thought we'd put together a round up of our journey so far! To give you an idea of just how much of a whirlwind adventure we've had... by the turn of this year, 'veggie hot dog truck' was just an idea on a list of other crazy ideas, by March we had secured Quorn as a supplier and by June we were on the road embarking on a summer of fun taking Not Dogs to the masses at festivals all over the UK!

After visiting five festivals, we ended our summer of festival fun at Festival No 6 in the beautiful setting of Portmeirion in Wales. The people, place and music made it one of our best festivals so far - again with so much amazing and exciting feedback from festival-goers, both veggie and meat-eaters! We spent nearly every moment we were there in our little purple home, so we didn't see any of the acts - but we were very close to the main stage so we could hear them and had a great view when we could look up from the sausages!

Thank you to all our new found fans who queued and waiting patiently for a Not Dog - and we are sorry we sold out on Sunday, we couldn't believe it either! Sunday was also my birthday - and thinking back to what I was doing a year ago, it was very strange to think I was spending this birthday running my own business & serving up veggie hot dogs with Jane, it was definitely a birthday I will never forget!

From Festival No 6 we headed straight to Stokesley in Middlesborough where we had been invited by Quorn to park up our truck and serve all the staff Not Dogs for lunch. We had a great day presenting to the sales and marketing team about our summer and going behind the scenes to see some top-secret products being made! We are looking forward to going back very soon!

As we left Wales to embark up North, we received the news that we'd made it to the final two in the Virgin Food Fest competition - a search to find the most exciting food entrepreneurs. In less than a week we were filming a 45 second elevator pitch in Virgin HQ's Battleship Building and creating an event stand for the finale that would mimic our food truck! The final took place earlier this week where we met Paul Lindley, founder of Ella's Kitchen, Hemsley & Hemsley, Sir Richard Branson and the judge of our category 'Tastiest Start up', Acting Editor of Guardian Food magazine; Mina Holland. 

We met so many amazing people and lots of new fans of Not Dogs, and even took a great #sausageselfie with Paul Lindley! The event was great fun, and the Q&A with the judges on stage was inspiring and insightful. We were busy writing down every word Sir Richard Branson said about making a fool of yourself to get your brand noticed when he directed a question straight at us asking us how we had made fools of ourselves so far! Of course after the summer we've had it wasn't hard to reply!

Unfortunately we lost out to a great finalist Killer Tomato - a Mexican street food chef in London chosen as the winner by Mina Holland. Despite not being crowned the winners, we honestly had the best day out meeting some very inspirational people, and most importantly people who were routing for us throughout the day and after the event. The support from so many people who had us as their winner was absolutely overwhelming - thank you to everyone we met!

So where to next? It looks like this journey isn't going to end anytime soon! We are now embarking on an Autumn tour kicking off with University Freshers Weeks. Tomorrow we will be at Leeds University for the day, followed by Bournemouth and ending in London over the next couple of weeks - we're so excited to take Not Dogs to students and see what they think!

And so ends our first Summer tour, we've got a huge thank you list to get working on, it's been the toughest work we've ever done, but we've had so much fun, met so many characters - and we're so excited to have created a brand and product that so many others love just as much as us. Here's to the future!

You can keep up to date with where Not Dogs will be next over on our website, Twitter & Instagram channels.

Katie x