The Drive That Started SideStall

Every parent knows this drive. Kids in the back, somewhere to be, and a road you've done a hundred times.

For Santo Arabia, that road ran between the Adelaide Hills and Gawler. It passes roadside stalls (the trestle tables, the eskies, the tins with a slot cut in the lid) and he almost never got to stop at any of them.

"On the way there, the kids were screaming. On the way back, they were asleep … and I'd forget where the stalls were."

That's what he told the Sunday Mail in April, and it's the whole problem in two sentences. Not a shortage of good food grown close to home: South Australia has plenty. Just no way to find it twice.

A stall you can't find again may as well not exist

Roadside stalls have run on the same technology for a century: a sign, a table, and trust. It works beautifully for the people who drive past at the right moment. It works not at all for everyone else.

If you don't spot the stall, you don't buy. If you spot it while doing 80 with a car full of kids, you don't buy. If you remember it fondly on Thursday but can't recall which road it was on, you don't buy. The grower has done everything right and still sold nothing, because the only marketing channel available was a passing glance.

That's what SideStall was built to fix. Santo teamed up with co-founder Vong Kim, a software engineer, and the two of them built it in a matter of months. As the Sunday Mail reported, it launched in April to nearly a thousand users in its first week.

What it actually does

SideStall puts the stalls on a map.

You open the app and see what's near you (fruit and veg, eggs, honey, baked goods, plants, handmade things), sorted by distance, with the sellers who are open right now up front. Every seller gets a proper page: photos, their story, opening hours, what they accept, and one-tap directions to the gate. Find a grower you like and you can favourite them, so next time it takes one tap rather than a lucky glance out the window.

You can also pay in the app (card, Apple Pay or Google Pay), which matters for the growers as much as the buyers. A tin on a table is a cash-only business with an obvious weak point, and plenty of stallholders have lost a day's takings to someone who helped themselves.

The honesty box isn't going anywhere, though. Plenty of sellers still take cash at the gate, and plenty of buyers still prefer it. The tin is part of why this way of shopping is worth protecting in the first place. SideStall just means it doesn't have to be the only option. Each stall shows what it accepts, and that's the seller's call, not ours.

Why the honesty box is worth the trouble

There's a version of this app that's just a directory, and a version that's just payments. Neither is the point.

The point is that there's a whole economy running quietly off the side of Australian roads: surplus from a good season, a backyard flock laying more than one family can eat, someone who bakes on Fridays. And almost none of it is visible unless you happen to drive past. It's the least industrial food in the country and the hardest to buy.

Making it findable is a small technical problem standing in front of a genuinely good thing.

If you've got a stall

If you sell at the gate, on the roadside, or out of a fridge at the end of your driveway, you can list it. It's free to start, your exact address stays private if you'd rather show an approximate area, and you can take payment before pickup or keep taking cash, whichever suits how you already trade.

And if you've ever driven past a stall and wished you could find it again, that's the app.

Download SideStall, free on iPhone and Android.

Thanks to the Sunday Mail for the write-up: "Honest, stall app a winner", 26 April 2026.