Our story
How The Avo Shack started.
It started at a Melbourne market stall and never really left. Everything since has been the same idea at a bigger size.
7 News — at the gates, mid-festival.
Meet the founder
Sam Rokebrand
“I wasn’t trying to build a catering company. I just thought people deserved something better than a sausage in bread.”
It began with a folding table at a local market: smashed avo on rustic sourdough, made to order, for whoever walked past. It sold out on the first day. So he came back the next weekend, and the one after that, and started paying attention to what people actually asked for.
The wraps came out of that. A market crowd wants to keep walking, and a wrap is the only thing on earth that holds avocado, egg, greens and sauce together in one hand without falling apart. It became the thing people crossed the market twice for.
Word travels fast among traders, and the weekends turned into festival bookings — which is a completely different job. A festival doesn’t want a stall, it wants a vendor who can hold a queue of two hundred people from breakfast to midnight and still be smiling. Learning that took a few seasons and a lot of long nights.
One stall became two. Two became a full setup with its own signage, boards and crew — and then the setups multiplied, so we could hold several sites on the same weekend without either of them dropping standard. Today The Avo Shack trades at some of the biggest events in the country and caters private functions from wedding breakfasts to remote-site crew feeds, right across Australia.
What hasn’t changed is who’s on the line. The person who quotes your event is the person cooking at it. That is the whole reason this works, and it is the first thing we’d lose if we grew the wrong way — so we don’t.
How it grew
How it grew.
No investors, no franchise, no sudden leap. Just a lot of weekends.
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The market stall
A folding table, a toaster and smashed avo on sourdough. Sold out on day one, came back the next weekend.
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The wraps
Built for a crowd that wants to keep walking. The B.L.A.T went on the board and never came off it.
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The first festivals
A different job entirely — long days, big queues, no shortcuts. This is where the crew and the run sheet came from.
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Multiple setups
Several shacks, several sites, one standard. Plus private catering, because the people who ate at a festival started asking us to do their wedding.
The crew
The crew.
Small, trained, and genuinely good at the part most caterers treat as an afterthought: the ninety seconds a guest spends at the counter. Everyone who works a shack has done their food-handling certification, and everyone on the line can cook every item on the board.
The line
Two to six cooks depending on your numbers, plus a dedicated runner once we’re past a few hundred covers.
The counter
Fast, friendly, and able to answer a dietary question properly without going to find someone else.
The late shift
Our busiest hour is usually the one everyone else has packed up for. We roster for it rather than hoping.
The obsession
We taste every delivery. An underripe avocado is not a small problem when it is the name above the door.
More crew portraits would lift this section a long way — four faces, four names, four one-liners. See the README for the shot list.
How we work
How we work.
Four things you can expect on any booking, whether it’s forty people in a backyard or four thousand through a gate.
One quote, all in
Staff, travel, equipment and packaging are in the number we send you. If something would push it up, you hear about it before we do it — not on the invoice.
We cook to order
Nothing is made weeks ahead and thawed. Prep starts the day before, cooking starts the morning of, and it is cooked in front of the people eating it.
We size to your numbers
The crew is scaled to the peak hour you’re expecting, not to what would be convenient for us. Under-staffing a service to win a quote is how caterers get a bad name.
We leave it clean
Pack down is part of the job, not an extra line. Waste, grey water and oil go with us, and the ground goes back the way we found it.
Where we go
Where we travel.
Melbourne is home and most of our season is Victoria — the city, the Peninsula, the regional festivals. We go interstate for the ones worth packing the truck for.
We’ve traded in festival paddocks, exhibition halls, backyards, warehouses, wineries and station country. If your site has restrictions on access, power, water or noise, send them through early: it changes what we’d suggest running, and it is much cheaper to know at quote than at bump-in.
Come and find us.
Or have us come to you. Tell us the date and the numbers and we’ll do the rest.