Ah, State Fair food:
The anticipation.
The aroma.
The analytics.
2014 business grad Patrick Huber sees his new project as a public service—what the Minnesota State Fair cannot do because of COVID, he can do by code. And that is to help people get their fix of State Fair fare.
Huber, of Minneapolis, recently created and launched the Fair Food Finder app that allows the user to search their favorite state fair vendors by name and track them down. Three dozen vendors have provided Huber with their locations, hours and other special events.
He created the app after seeing and talking with the creators of a Facebook page that listed the whereabouts of state fair food providers.
“I took it a step further,” he said. The app allows users to search for vendors by name and for participating vendors to add their own hours and events.
“I had the same problem that everybody else did in wanting to find these vendors,” Huber said. “It was more a community service effort to help people find them. I knew at that point the vendors were going to be struggling in these times with their income gone for the entire year.”
Response has been piping hot. In the first week of launching the app, there were 11,000 unique viewers, and 150,000 different hits among the 30-plus food stands working with him.
“It’s been pretty crazy,” Huber said. “There’s been a drop-off since, but it’s still averaging about 5,000 people a week the past couple of weeks.”
He arranged the app so that vendors can add and modify at their end—their hours, locations, etc. As the designer, he’s privy to the data involved and which vendors are getting the most interest.
“I’ve got analytics built into everything,” he said. For the record the top three thus far are: Minnesnowii Shaved Ice, Blue Loon Concessions and KCM Eggrolls.
Huber created the Fair Food Finder during his down-time after a Minneapolis company for which he made apps folded due to the pandemic. Over the past ten years, he’s developed and designed apps and websites as a freelancer and started up products and businesses along the way.
He ran a specialized online skateboard shop and developed a camera system specifically for watching food cook in ovens (“You stick it on your oven and view what’s going on in your oven along with timers and alerts. I called it the Gecko Oven Camera.)
A business major when he enrolled in 2006, Huber’s tech savvy resulted in getting hired by the University’s IT division, working full-time for three years, after which he took a job with a financial firm.
“I finally made it back in 2014 to finish my degree.”
Whether or not he’ll continue the app past fall depends on a number of factors.
“It’s really a question of what it’s going to look like next year,” he said. “I’m actually hoping [vendors] see this as a viable option to do maybe like a mixture. They don’t have to rely on a couple events each year to make all their money, but maybe do a few more pop-ups as time permits between these different fairs that are going to operate.”
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