Trends: Pop-ups take root in Melbourne

Pop-up cafes may have begun as a way for aspiring business owners to get a hospitality leg-up or to explore fresh ideas, but they've quickly become mainstream, and property developers have jumped on the idea of injecting buzz by setting up temporary food concepts.

"Pop-up is moving really fast beyond the trend and is actually formalising as an industry," says Bec McHenry, director of Pop Union, which services and supports pop-ups. The company recently partnered with Hamton Property Group to open A Blessing in Disguise, an Abbotsford espresso bar within the display suite of luxury development Sanctuary. From concept to construction, A Blessing in Disguise was brought to life in a month.

The food is sourced from nearby cafes A Thousand Blessings and Abbotsford Convent Bakery, and coffee from Johnny Frangouli of Melba Coffee, and Pop Union is collating the temporary cafe's sales data for Hamton, which will use it to demonstrate viability to potential permanent cafe or restaurant tenants.

Also involved in Sanctuary is Evan Cathcart, director of residential marketing agency 360° Property Group. Cathcart approached the People's Market to help launch the 234-apartment Oxley development in Stanley Street, Collingwood, after observing its success on the then-vacant land. "The People's Market developed a real following on the site," says Cathcart. "Adding other layers of interest to the project launch brought people there that weren't necessarily looking at property."

At Neometro's nearby Number Nine Smith Street development, temporary cafe Place Holder set up rent-free in February. Customers in for a caffeine fix can't ignore the development - only a window separates the cafe from the showroom apartment. Place Holder plans to move to another temporary location when construction begins around September.

Coffee baron Salvatore Malatesta says, "A building without coffee as an anchor is a building without soul." Malatesta has set up the Church of Secular Coffee, a St Ali offshoot, alongside Jimmy Grants and Kong BBQ, at Rue & Co, a temporary dining hub at 80 Collins Street in the CBD. It has a lifespan of up to nine months before Queensland Investment Corporation begins work on a $550 million, 39-storey development on the site.

From the developer's perspective, pop-up eateries make the locality more desirable, kick-starting sales and residential interest. From a hospitality perspective, Malatesta says pop-ups act as research centres for new ideas, helping Melbourne stay at the forefront of the coffee and food scene.

But pop-ups - like hospitality concepts - are by nature evolutionary. "Food has an expiry date, whether it's sitting in the fridge or on the street," says McHenry. "Concepts get rebranded; operators move on; places get sold. Everything has a temporary cycle, and pop-ups allow us to feed into that."