Cities where the street food culture is expanding can help the street life thriving. Good food can do more than just satisfy a hungry stomach; it can also make a significant difference in urban neighborhoods.

Individuals can form human relationships as a result of the food, and it is something that makes people feel like they’re a part of their city in ways that don’t always happen indoors. Standing shoulder to shoulder with other people eating at a market certanly brings us closer together, which can help our healing from the long time lockdowns and lack of social connections in the past years.

We spoke on the topic of how street food and marketplaces have an impact on the city’s areas with Ms. Hollie Lin, CGO of the Manifesto Market, and we learned some interesting details about their Prague venue and future plans.

Tell us first, what is your role at Manifesto?

Like other members in the founding team, my role evolved over the last few years. Currently, I am leading various aspects of the company's growth, so that we can welcome more guests and make them happy, that goes with creating more jobs and creating better revenue for our chefs and tenants. I take of the growth and all aspects of it, except the geographic expansion of Manifesto. This is Martin Barry’s specialty.

What was Mr. Barry’s inspiration behind opening the Manifesto Market? Did he have previous experience in similar projects overseas?

Martin is a place maker. Both of us care about creating real places to make people smile. Being from Taipei, Taiwan, I grew up with the night market culture. Since I moved to Europe, I really missed the food, the variety, the chaos and the vibrant energy of those places. On the flip side, I also like to utilize my professional experience from YouTube and Google to manage and scale this kind of experience.

Martin has an extensive experience from landscape architecture and ambitious redevelopment projects in many cities around the Globe, built on a much much bigger scale than any of the Manifestos you could have visited. We are just getting started, and we love to combine our backgrounds and implement that experience in a completely different industry.

What was the impact of the market on the direct area of Florenc and Smichov, what was the initial feedback of the locals?

Each of those places is different and each of our projects was unique and specific to that concrete place. Yet, there is at least one impact you could observe everywhere. Our interventions helped the safety of those places, something that seemed unsolvable until we stepped in with our concepts.

All of the positive feedback we received from our customers who shared thousands of reviews until today has been energizing and inspiring and helps us improve every day and come up with new ideas.

What was the general response of the visitors to the fact that the place is completely cashless?

Some people expected a dramatic resistance but the opposite was true, it was very smooth. Our belief has been that cash is dirty and it has no place in restaurants. In a cashless environment, restaurant staff are able to focus on offering delicious food and great customer service without concerns about food safety.

Throughout the pandemic, consumers have expressed appreciation that they do not need to touch cash during transactions and that the transactions are faster. Other than that, cashless operations are transparent and much easier to manage for the owners, and finally, consider safety again.

None of the restaurant staff members have to carry cash after closing their bistro in the night. In fact, over 97% of guests that we’ve surveyed like the cashless environment, even before the pandemic and most of the remaining voices were neutral.

How many stands are in each food hub?

Usually, 15 to 28 depending on the size of the area, on the seating capacity and the demographics in the nearby vicinity – the most important is the 10-minute perimeter. The exact number comes down to our deep understanding and analysis of data, and sometimes to the spatial possibilities of a location. It’s good to mention that some bistros can double as virtual kitchens and operate additional brands from one space, available to order online.

What is the most popular cuisine stand among the visitors?

Among our top sellers, there are meatless meals: Fries and churros! If we leave out pivo, of course. With that said, the guests of Manifesto love to find an unmatched variety in the market, from burgers, tacos, American barbeque, Indian butter chicken, seafood, and poke bowls and anything their heart desires. And they all walked away with satisfaction with delicious fries with cheddar cheese or churros with cinnamon sugar and caramel dips.

We would like to learn more about the Manifesto On Wheels initiative.

“We transform ordinary places into memorable experiences” is our motto, and Manifesto On Wheels started from the same idea. We decided to deliver a classic seasonal drink, svařák (hot mulled wine), deep in the early days of the pandemic, in November 2020, to people’s doorstep.

We did this because we felt that people confined to their homes might dearly miss that annual experience of going out with their friends and families for a cup of svařák. We thought, if people cannot enjoy their cup of svařák at Manifesto, what about helping them experience it at home and still feel the vibes of the festive season? We tried to bottle the product, hired a talented illustrator to design cheerful labels, we drove to all the
possible addresses around Prague – and some colleagues were honestly surprised what is still considered as Prague.

The aftermath was a somewhat surprising success for us. That led us to launch a collection of classic and original artisanal ready-to-drink cocktails. We rolled out products like the “Quarantini” or “Staycation” series with “Sip of” several exotic places people could not travel to.

Initially, we thought we’d bring the bar to people’s homes in our own cocktail truck – hence the name “Manifesto on Wheels” – but later transformed the idea into delivery of great drinks. People really love these drinks, even outside of lockdowns, so we’ll keep expanding these collections.

How does one corporate event look like, what should a company organizing their team building know about?

You are right, Manifesto is seen as a place for bigger events and parties and we receive reservations for both – company outings but also family gatherings. Those events can perfectly co-exist with our normal operations and vibes, we are able to reserve areas such as the terrace or the cultural zone, and even the whole market for very specific requests, to create a memorable experience.

Besides that, we host thought-leadership events, such as the Sustainability Festival or the 2020 edition of Innovators, a Czech award for the most innovative and inspiring companies. The only advice is to get in touch with us early enough, ideally, a month ahead or more, depending on how ambitious and complex the event is.

We would like to learn more about the newly opening food hub in Berlin.

Manifesto Berlin will open in the second half of this year at Potsdamer Platz. We could not have dreamt of a better location to begin our international market expansion. It’s a crossroads of culture, shopping, office hubs, and entertainment brands and it’s located right at one of the busiest public transit hubs with daily traffic of 110k people.

It will be our largest space to date, and it will be continental Europe’s largest food hall. We’ll continue the cashless solution because Berliners, like most of our guests in Prague, will love using digital and contactless payments at Manifesto. We are deeply into the curatorial process of selecting from an awesome lineup of dozens of interested, innovative restaurants. Stay tuned, we will be announcing the first committed restaurants in the coming weeks! We are also really excited to expand our newly launched brand, SOOT Bar, into Germany.

Do you have future plans to expand the business and idea of the Manifesto Market all over Europe, outside of the EU-zone perhaps?

e are working on opening several locations in Germany over the next 18-24 months. Martin Barry, Mandy Kwan, Petr Nemec and the expansion team have been pursuing new sites in major cities around Europe and we are exploring possible locations in the US, the home country of the Founder.

What factors will influence transportation in the future? Some believe that ride- and car-sharing will assist in determining the answer.

Shared mobility is a cutting-edge transportation approach that allows consumers to receive on-demand, short-term access to various forms of transportation. It can encompass car-sharing, bike-sharing, carpooling, and platform-based travel services, among other modes of transportation.

Historically, people could move throughout an urban region in a variety of methods; but new travel options made possible by modern technologies and commercial models have given people even more options.

Car-sharing has risen to the forefront of the sharing economy thanks to the convenience of requesting a car from our mobile phones. We spoke on various topics with Mr. Švaříček, the CEO of HoppyGo, a Czech based peer-to-peer P2P car-sharing company.

Q: What is the vision of the HoppyGo, and how do you incorporate it into your daily activities? 

The vision is to offer an affordable, convenient and flexible mobility solution in a few clicks that is environmentally friendly and helps local communities. We fulfill our vision via connecting the owners and drivers via our platform, offering a very flexible mobility offering (starting on one-day rentals all the way up to a year, starting from low hundreds of CZK per day for a small older hatchback but also offering a brand new e-vehicles, sports cars, and vans.

We are in constant touch with our community which helps us to develop the product in the right direction. Timing is now perfect for a summer trip/vacation, so go and choose a car on HoppyGo!

Q: What differentiates your business in comparison to the traditional rental companies?  

Firstly, it is the variety of the offer – 300 different types of cars, all kinds of categories (cabrio, van, sports car, SUV, MPV, you name it) starting at very low price as it does not have to necessarily be a brand new vehicle (we have cars of up to 15 years of age or 300K km).

Secondly, it is the guarantee that you will get the chosen vehicle, contradictory to the typical experience in traditional rental companies. Thirdly it is the full digital flow – everything is done via an app, no papers. Then we also have much lower deposits when you book the trip
and we accept all kinds of payment cards. The extra benefit is then the community aspect, because during the handover with HoppyGo, you most likely meet a friendly local car owner.

Q: What are the aspects of your work that you are most proud of? 

The community aspect creates connections between the locals, helping them to live smarter and show them the alternative to car ownership. The second is the sustainable aspect – we increase the utilization of the vehicles that would normally sit idle in the parking spot.

Last but not least it is the HoppyGo team and the platform we built in-house – rock-solid scalable solutions for many use cases, excellent UX/UI, and the hoppy mood we share.  We have a lot of users from foreign people visiting countries where we operate for work, studies or travel, and this perfectly suits their needs – mobility only when in need, flexible in the length of the trip and type of car, perfectly suiting to so many different use cases – and this is the feedback we hear from them very often, which makes us all “hoppy”!

Q: What kind of influence do you want to have on the future of carsharing in the Czech Republic? 

It is not just on car sharing, but more on car ownership. We believe that for some HoppyGo is an alternative to car ownership – for owners this is a way how they can keep their vehicle even in the period of ever-rising costs of having a car, for drivers this is the perfect solution if and when they have a mobility need.

Q: What is the general feedback of your partners and customers from Poland and Slovakia? Is it easy for a Czech carsharing company to penetrate the market of these countries?

We are lucky to have a strong platform that enables us to enter new markets without big capital investments. As a peer-to-peer car sharing, we do not own a fleet of vehicles, so the task for us is to have the platform with the best-in-class UX/UI and insurance product for the convenience and safety of the community. The UX/UI is shared across the countries and proved to be working in all markets. The acceptance positively surprised us in Poland
where the competition is strong and active.

In general, we have a product with a purpose that is appealing to masses, which helps a lot when launching new markets.

Q: I’m curious about your opinion on the local carsharing companies’ breakthrough, due to the rise of the bigger corporations. What are your thoughts about that? 

Well in all the markets we are active it is actually the local car-sharing companies (I mean the free-floating, minute-based companies, which is a different business case than HoppyGo) who are active, no big corporations in these markets for the time being. The market is growing and was also growing during the covid, I believe it confirms the future for these flexible, on-demand mobility solutions.

Q: Please tell us more about your opinion, how carsharing is impacting the environment? 

For us at HoppyGo it is what I already mentioned above, we increase the utilisation of the vehicles that would normally sit idle in the parking spot. From our users, we know that plenty of them decided to either sell their vehicle, offer it full time via HoppyGo, or/and not buy a new one partly also thanks to car-sharing platforms. In our case, that means that we helped to save some scarce resources.

Q: Last, but not least, do you have any amusing customers story to share? 

Of course, for example, a couple that got together and eventually married after the rental was done via HoppyGo – they met during the key’s handover for the first time. Or a lady at her 80+ who was one of the most popular and active car owners on our platform. With 160K users, 2,5K cars and thousands of trips every month, this would be a long list of stories