Togather Highlights Festival Food Trends For 2026

The latest festival season has delivered some clear signals about how attendee tastes are evolving, with Greek cuisine gaining momentum, plant-based options expanding rapidly, and onsite food & beverage (F&B) spend rising sharply. Event catering specialist Togather has released new data from its 2026 Festival Food Trends analysis, drawn from its work curating F&B at more than 80 large-scale events and festivals.

The company’s footprint spans a broad range of UK festivals, including established names such as The Isle Of Wight Festival, Wilderness, and Love Saves The Day. By aggregating order data and trading performance across these sites, Togather has identified shifts that are likely to influence how organisers, vendors, and technology providers plan festival experiences in the coming seasons.

Background & Industry Context

Food & beverage has become a defining element of the modern festival experience, moving far beyond traditional fast food or bar service. Organisers increasingly position F&B as a core part of the event proposition, with curated line-ups, specialist concepts, and regionally focused vendors. At the same time, onsite ordering systems, cashless payments, and data capture tools have created new visibility into what attendees actually buy and when.

For suppliers like Togather, which coordinates F&B operations across multiple large events, this visibility enables comparative analysis at scale. While individual festivals differ in audience profile and location, consistent patterns across dozens of shows can point to broader consumer behaviour trends relevant to the wider live events market.

The latest season’s data underlines how dietary preferences, price sensitivity, and perceived value are shaping purchasing decisions, with implications for menu design, operational planning, and the adoption of supporting technologies.

Key Developments In Festival Food Demand

Among the clearest signals in the 2026 trends is the growing appeal of Greek food at festivals. From gyros and souvlaki to mezze-led concepts, Greek cuisine has shown strong performance against more established street food categories. While precise figures were not disclosed, Togather’s analysis indicates that Greek offerings have moved from a niche presence to a mainstream choice within the festival catering mix.

In parallel, plant-based dining continues to expand across events. Togather reports that demand for plant-based options has roughly doubled compared with previous seasons. This reflects both a rise in fully vegan or vegetarian attendees and a broader shift toward flexitarian eating, where meat-eaters incorporate plant-based meals into their festival choices for health, sustainability, or variety reasons.

The report also highlights that onsite F&B spend has increased by around 18%. This uplift suggests that attendees are allocating a larger share of their festival budget to food and drink, whether due to price inflation, higher perceived quality, or a willingness to treat F&B as a key part of the experience rather than a functional necessity.

Across the portfolio of more than 80 events and festivals supported by Togather, these trends present consistently enough to be considered material rather than anecdotal. They are particularly notable at multi-day camping festivals and destination events, where attendees are more dependent on onsite provision and more inclined to explore diverse food choices.

Industry Impact Across Events & Vendors

For festival organisers, the rise in Greek food and plant-based demand has practical implications for vendor selection, layout planning, and capacity management. Curated F&B zones may need to rebalance stall categories to meet demand, ensuring that queues and throughput can be managed without compromising overall visitor experience.

Vendors, meanwhile, may view the data as a signal to adapt menus or introduce Greek-inspired or plant-forward dishes, even if they do not position themselves as entirely Greek or vegan operators. Some may choose to develop modular menus that allow them to flex between meat-based and plant-based recipes depending on the demographic profile of each event.

The 18% increase in onsite spend also prompts closer scrutiny of pricing, perceived value, and dwell time. While some of the uplift may be explained by rising input costs and inflation, the willingness of festival-goers to spend more on F&B could encourage operators to invest further in quality, presentation, and speed of service. That, in turn, creates opportunities for technology providers to support higher transaction volumes, richer data capture, and smoother customer journeys.

At a portfolio level, companies coordinating F&B across multiple festivals may use this kind of trend data to forecast inventory requirements, inform staffing models, and refine the balance between local independent traders and larger scalable brands. In an environment where margins can be tight, more accurate forecasting is becoming a competitive differentiator.

Why This Matters For Event Professionals & Technology Providers

For event directors and operations teams, the trends captured in Togather’s analysis underline the importance of treating F&B as a strategic lever rather than a secondary revenue stream. Rising spend, coupled with clearer cuisine preferences, means catering programmes can materially influence attendee satisfaction scores and repeat visitation.

The strong performance of Greek cuisine illustrates how quickly certain food categories can shift from optional to expected, particularly among younger audiences familiar with street food culture. Organisers seeking to differentiate their festival proposition may need to periodically refresh their vendor mix to avoid stagnation, supported by robust trading data from POS and ordering systems.

The doubling of plant-based demand has wider operational and branding implications. Festivals that do not provide sufficient vegan and vegetarian options may face criticism on inclusivity and sustainability grounds, while those that respond proactively can align with broader ESG narratives. Technology can help here by tracking sales of plant-based items, surfacing menu insights, and enabling pre-event communication about available dietary options.

For technology providers working in the F&B and wider event space, the 18% growth in onsite spend points to rising transaction volumes and higher expectations for reliability. Systems supporting mobile ordering, cashless payments, vendor performance dashboards, inventory tracking, and dynamic pricing all become more critical as revenue per head increases. Integrations between ticketing, access control, and F&B platforms may also offer organisers a more complete view of the attendee journey.

Conclusion & Outlook For Future Festival Seasons

While individual festivals will continue to have distinctive audience profiles and culinary identities, the patterns emerging from Togather’s 2026 Festival Food Trends analysis suggest some broad shifts that the wider events sector cannot ignore. Greek cuisine is moving firmly into the mainstream festival offer, plant-based eating is no longer a fringe requirement but a core expectation, and onsite F&B spend is trending upward.

As organisers plan upcoming editions, many will reassess vendor line-ups, infrastructure, and supporting technology with these trends in mind. For suppliers and platforms across the event technology ecosystem, the message is clear: food & beverage is an increasingly data-rich, strategically important component of the live experience, and the tools that help organisers understand and respond to changing tastes will be in growing demand.