Festival Vending Trailer Checklist for Acadiana (Printable)

Acadiana does not have a festival season. It has a festival calendar, and it runs twelve months. Sugar Cane, Festivals Acadiens, Omelette and Cracklin in the fall, then Boudin, Festival International, Crawfish and Frog through April and May: a trailer that is ready to roll can work most weekends of the year within an hour of our lot on the Evangeline Thruway. The vendors who make money on that circuit are not the ones with the best gumbo. They are the ones who show up with the permit in the glovebox, the generator sized right, the tanks full and the trailer level before the gates open.

This is the checklist we wrote for anyone working that circuit out of a Ragin' Custom food trailer. Print the last section and tape it inside the door.

The Acadiana festival calendar, verified

Dates come from each festival's own website or a local news report we read while writing this; where next year's dates were not posted, we say so.

The fall run is seven weeks long and all within 45 minutes of Lafayette; the spring run packs four festivals into five weeks. Miss mid-September or the end of March and you miss the money.

Step 1: Permits, applications and paper

Get on the vendor list first. Applications open months out and the big festivals are selective. Festivals Acadiens et Créoles publishes a list of its official festival food vendors and posts no open application on that page, so ask the festival office early how new vendors get considered. Downtown Alive! takes a vendor application form on downtownlafayette.org and the event manager follows up. The Sugar Cane Festival posts vendor forms on its site. Ask four things: booth size, power and amperage, whether generators are allowed and where, and whether water is on the grounds.

State health permit for the event. Louisiana law sets the temporary or special event food permit fee at twenty-five dollars for the entire event, and a seasonal establishment pays fifteen dollars per month of operation instead of an annual fee (La. R.S. 40:31.37). Apply through the Louisiana Department of Health sanitarian for the parish where the festival sits, so a Lafayette vendor working Crawfish Fest deals with St. Martin Parish. Your permanent permits still have to be current; the LDH sanitarian's office for your home parish is where to confirm them, and our custom food trailer cost guide covers what permits, commissary and insurance add after the build.

Local paper. Lafayette Consolidated Government issues its own mobile food unit permit, and other parishes and towns have their own.

The folder that lives in the trailer: health permit, event permit, commissary agreement, food safety manager certificate, liability certificate naming the festival, fire suppression service tag, propane leak-test log, sales tax registration. Sanitarians and fire marshals walk the row the first morning; one sleeve keeps that to a two-minute check.

Step 2: Power

Add up the load. List the nameplate running watts of everything: refrigeration, freezer, hood fan, lights, POS, warmers, any electric fryer or griddle. Compressors pull several times their running draw at start-up, so leave headroom; propane cooking barely touches the electrical side, electric cooking dominates it. Your build sheet lists the panel and branch circuits we installed. Some festivals run 30 A or 50 A RV-style pedestals; many do not. Plan on a generator unless the festival puts power in writing.

Two real numbers to size against. A dual-fuel open-frame unit such as the Westinghouse WGen9500DF is rated 9,500 running and 12,500 peak watts on gasoline (8,500 and 11,200 on propane), runs 12 hours at 25 percent load on a 6.6 gallon tank, is rated 74 dBA, weighs 211 lb and has both L14-30R and 14-50R 120/240 V outlets. That class runs a full kitchen with refrigeration and an electric griddle. A quiet inverter such as the Westinghouse iGen5000 is rated 3,900 running and 5,000 peak watts, 18 hours at 25 percent load on 3.4 gallons, 52 dBA and 104.7 lb, with a 120 V TT-30R outlet; that covers a propane-cooking trailer's refrigeration, lights, fans and register. At a music festival the vendor coordinator hears the 74 dBA unit from the stage.

Step 3: Water and wastewater

Louisiana health code expects a three-compartment sink, a separate handwash sink and fresh and gray tanks sized to the menu, which is why both sinks are on the spec list of our starter example build; your tank sizes and water heater are on the build sheet. At a festival the question is whether the tanks are full, the water is hot and the gray is legal to empty.

• Fill the fresh tank at your commissary with a white potable-water hose, never a garden hose off a spigot at the grounds.
• Louisiana's sanitary code requires the waste retention (gray) tank on a mobile unit to be at least 15 percent larger than the fresh tank (LAC 51:XXIII-4521), the same rule the FDA Food Code sets; read both sizes off the build sheet before the sanitarian does.
• Dump gray water at the commissary or a designated dump station, never on festival grounds. It is the fastest way to lose next year's booth.
• Bring twice the ice you think you need. October in Girard Park is still 85 degrees.

Step 4: Propane and fire

Cook with propane, fryers or open flame and expect a fire inspection before you serve. The model code is NFPA 96 with NFPA 1 Section 50.7: cooking that produces grease-laden vapors must be protected by an approved hood fire suppression system, any unit with a propane appliance and an electrical system needs a propane detector (B.19.2.1), propane leak-detection testing must be documented with the paperwork kept in the unit (B.19.2.5), the cooking operation and generator need 10 ft of clear space from buildings, combustibles and other cooking operations, and nobody refuels while cooking; shut the generator down and let it cool first. Staff must be trained on extinguishers, fuel shut-off and leak checks.

Our hoods ship with suppression installed: 6 ft on the 8.5x16 starter example build, 8 ft on the 8.5x20 loaded example, 10 ft on the 8.5x24 flagship; all three are built to order, not sitting on the lot. Bring the maintenance: the suppression tag inside its six-month window, a Class K extinguisher for grease plus an ABC, cylinders mounted in their bracket outside the cooking space, generator exhaust downwind of your window and your neighbor's, cord gauge rated for the run with GFCI protection, and a soapy-water leak test after the drive, logged and dated.

Step 5: The serving window and the line

The trailer sells before the food does.

• Confirm which side faces the crowd before you back in; a window on the wrong side is a lost day.
• Two windows on a 20 or 24 ft build split ordering from pickup and roughly double line speed, which is why our loaded and flagship example builds carry two and three windows.
• Menu board readable from 20 ft, eight items or fewer. Festival lines punish long menus.
• Awning down and lit; Festivals Acadiens and Downtown Alive! both run into the evening.

Step 6: Towing it to the site

A food trailer gets heavier every time you fill something.

• Start from the build sheet: GVWR and empty weight as delivered. Every Ragin' Custom build is different; check the build sheet, not a blog post.
• Add water at 8.3 lb per gallon, propane, ice, product, generator and fuel. A loaded 8.5x20 kitchen is thousands of pounds heavier than the shell you towed home. Put it on a CAT scale once, loaded.
• Run that number through our towing check against your truck's tow rating, payload and hitch class; a half-ton that pulled the empty trailer home may be over its payload with a full kitchen behind it.
• Brake controller set for the loaded weight, chains crossed, breakaway clipped, lights checked, tires at sidewall pressure including the spare.
• Tow with tanks empty when the festival has water on site, full when it does not, and arrive inside the vendor load-in window; the row closes to vehicles once the public arrives.
• Grass gets soft after rain at Girard Park, Parc Hardy and Rayne alike. Carry 2x12 pads for the jacks, wheel chocks and a bubble level; two degrees off level drains sinks wrong and rolls fryer oil to one side.

We deliver free within 50 miles of Lafayette, which covers every festival in the table above, Delcambre included.

The printable checklist

30 days out

• Vendor application accepted; booth, power and water answers in writing
• Event health permit filed with the sanitarian for the festival's parish
• Liability certificate naming the festival requested
• Suppression tag in its service window; Class K and ABC extinguishers dated
• Generator sized against the nameplate total; cords and GFCI checked

Week of

• Commissary fill scheduled; potable hose packed
• Cylinders filled; leak-test kit and log aboard
• POS updated, backup card reader charged, change ordered
• Trailer weighed loaded; towing check passed
• Tires, spare, lights, brake controller, breakaway checked

Load-out morning

• Permit folder in the door sleeve
• Fresh tank per the water answer; gray tank empty
• Refrigeration at temperature before product goes in; fryer oil sealed for the drive
• Pads, chocks, level, customer step packed

On site

• Level, chock, stabilize; window facing the crowd
• Leak test after the drive, logged
• Generator 10 ft from anything, exhaust downwind, fueled before cooking
• Handwash sink stocked; hot water proven; sanitizer strips out
• Awning down, lights on, menu up, signal tested
• Gray water sealed for the commissary at tear-down, never dumped

Ready for the fall run?

The fall run opens with Sugar Cane in late September and the spring run with Boudin Fest in April, and a Ragin' Custom trailer is built to order around your menu, typically six to eight weeks, so the festival you are aiming for sets the order date. No food trailer sits on our lot waiting: the 8.5x16, 8.5x20 and 8.5x24 example builds on our inventory page show the range and are priced as configured, so spec your own in the food trailer builder, check what is arriving on coming soon, and read how financing works before you commit to a build date. Text 337-279-2620 with the festival you are aiming for and we will tell you honestly whether it can be ready in time.

Sources

• https://festivalsacadiens.com/
• https://festivalsacadiens.com/official-festival-food-vendors/
• https://www.festivalinternational.org/
• https://bbcrawfest.com/
• https://scottboudinfestival.com/
• https://www.hisugar.org/
• https://www.giantomelette.org/
• https://cracklinfest.com/
• https://973thedawg.com/rayne-frog-festival-2026/
• https://www.explorelouisiana.com/events/events-festivals/delcambre-shrimp-festival-0
• https://www.klfy.com/local/st-landry-parish/southwest-louisiana-zydeco-festival-returns-sept-5/
• https://www.downtownlafayette.org/events-landing/downtown-alive
• https://legis.la.gov/legis/Law.aspx?d=861002
• https://www.law.cornell.edu/regulations/louisiana/La-Admin-Code-tit-51-SS-XXIII-4521
• https://blog.qrfs.com/281-food-truck-fire-safety-regulations-new-nfpa-model-code/
• https://westinghouse.com/products/wgen9500df-generator-dual-fuel
• https://westinghouse.com/products/igen5000-inverter-generator
• Hood sizes and window counts for the example builds come from our own listings at ragintrailers.com/inventory.html; per-unit weights, tank sizes and GVWR come from the build sheet.

← Back to all posts