State of the Stand 2026: one stand, two seasons
A case study of one high-school football concession stand: two seasons, twenty games, every sale recorded after the game.
Measure your own
Your stand, your numbers
Two free game weeks. Record what sold, and your own figures replace these.
Start freeThe kind of night decides the takings
Nine varsity home nights and eleven JV or Freshmen nights, on the same menu, from the same window. The varsity nights took about ten times what a JV night took, on average.
| Night | Games | Share of takings |
|---|---|---|
| Varsity | 9 | 89.4% |
| JV and Freshmen | 11 | 10.6% |
The two kinds of night never overlapped. The worst varsity game of the two seasons — one that sat through a rain delay — still took more than four times the best JV game.
If you plan one order sheet for every game, it is wrong in one direction or the other every single week. The same stand on a JV night is about what to do instead.
The mix barely moves
The size of a night swings wildly. What people buy, as a share of everything they buy, does not. Between one varsity night and the next, an item’s share of everything sold moved by 0.7 percentage points on average, even though the busiest varsity night sold more than twice as much as the quietest. Between JV nights it moved by 1.4 percentage points, because a quiet night sells few enough items that one family’s order shows. Hot dogs, fries, water and candy take roughly the same slice of a night whether the stand is busy or quiet.
So the ordering rule is simple: scale the quantities, keep the proportions. Work out how many servings the night will need in total, and split that total the same way you did last time. The part that takes judgement is the size of the crowd, not the shape of the order.
Where the money comes from
Food and drinks are nine-tenths of the takings between them. Candy, which takes up a lot of shelf space and a lot of the ordering conversation, is a small slice of the money.
| Category | Share of the takings |
|---|---|
| Food | 48.2% |
| Drinks | 42.4% |
| Candy | 6.2% |
| Snacks | 2.8% |
| Desserts | 0.4% |
What carries the margin
| Item | Price | Cost per serving | Margin |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sweet tea | $3.00 | $0.27 | 91.0% |
| Hot dog | $4.00 | $0.61 | 84.8% |
| Nachos | $4.00 | $0.63 | 84.3% |
| Coffee | $3.00 | $0.49 | 83.7% |
| French fries | $4.00 | $0.80 | 80.0% |
| Bottled water | $3.00 | $0.99 | 67.0% |
| Canned soda | $3.00 | $1.53 | 49.0% |
| Kit Kat | $2.00 | $1.16 | 42.0% |
Things the stand makes — where you buy by the case and sell by the serving — clear 80%. Things it resells as they came mostly land between 40% and 70%, and a single flat price across the candy shelf hides a spread from 23% to 69%. Which items actually make you money has the full tables.
One season to the next
Twelve games in 2025 and eight so far in 2026 — too few to call a trend. Of 2026’s three varsity nights, one ran through a rain delay, and with so few games a single wet Friday moves the average more than any real change in the crowd would.