Fun and the Headaches

Transcript

 

Hi, my name is Jolin Cheng, and you're listening to Food Trucks' Future.

 

Imagine you are walking down the street with your friends and you smell tacos. You turn around and see a food truck. Then, your friend slows down and says, “That smells so good.” 

 

In Boston, food trucks might not always be recognized or known by many people, but they have become a part of the city’s food culture. The unique cuisines reflect multicultural backgrounds. A food truck gives the idea that anyone can start a small business. While some gain popularity, others leave the streets.

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How do vendors make pizza inside tiny spaces? Why do owners want to start a food truck? What is it like to make food in a truck? People in the food truck industry tell their stories...

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JC: Laura D'arcangelo, crew leader of one of the Bon Me food trucks, used to be a phlebotomist, but now enjoys working in a food truck.

 

Laura D'arcangelo: The food truck community really attracts really cool people. When I get back to the commissary, I get to go into the office where all the managers are, and they are just really cool young people that really like their jobs. I don’t wake up any morning I'm like “Oh I have to go to work today." I have never dreaded coming to work.

 

JC: In 2010, Patrick Lynch and Ali Fong, owners of Bon Me, won Boston’s first Food Truck Contest, then officially ran the Bon Me truck on the streets in 2011. Bon Me has opened 8 restaurants. To D'arcangelo, Bon Me deserves success because of its good taste.

 

LD: I think cause everyone just really likes our food. It’s pretty good. I even eat it every day and haven’t gotten sick of it yet.

 

JC: Working in a truck, D'arcangelo has to constantly deal with unexpected issues. For example, she had to replace some of the broken refrigerators. The other day, she had to walk to one of the restaurants to get scallions, because she forgot to stock them in advance, but the hardest part is driving the big truck.

 

LD: Because it’s so big, you have to depend on mirrors. I can’t see off the back. I have to be careful that I don’t get into accidents. Where the commissary is, it’s on a double yellow line road. There are always cars. I have to pull into the commissary in backward and back in. I have to get in between trucks. That's the most difficult part.

 

JC: Starting 15 minutes before the truck closes, D'arcangelo counts the cash box, wraps things up, then drives the truck back to the commissary, where she and two or three other workers take off the composed bin and used dishes, stock inventory and prepare for the next day.

 

LD: I think it's really fun. You get people to watch and I get to work at different locations.

 

JC: To D'arcangelo, it’s fun to sell food in different places. To Steven Leslie, selling food in a truck can also be a wild card. Leslie is a pizza maker at Stoked Wood Fired Pizza truck. He says it takes more to work in a truck than in a restaurant.

 

Steven Leslie: It’s different every day. In the restaurant, there’s a home base. People can show up to and you show up there at 5 and that’s nice, but here you gotta have people meet the truck at certain places, go certain places. It’s all over the place. You don’t have that home base.

 

JC: Leslie has been working with the team since they started five years ago. The red truck, with built-in pizza oven, hit the street in 2014. After two years, Scott Riebling and Toirm Miller, owners of the truck, opened their restaurant. Now the truck is out almost every day.

 

SL: For me, it’s not the food truck. It’s the pizza. You get awesome pizza all over the city. We go to the Hot Balloon Festival. We come right here downtown. We're at Havard. We do wedding down the middle of the forest. We do cool stuff. That’s what I love about it. I love it.

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JC: Jackson Renshaw, the co-founder of Fresh Food Generation truck, also has a passion for food. He doesn’t have a specific focus like Leslie does, but he wants to use his truck as a tool to bring healthy and fresh food to all neighborhoods.

 

Jackson Renshaw: For me, the food truck was a way to overcome economic and geographic barriers to food access. I thought it was a really cool idea. I said "Sure, how hard could it be?" So five years later, after many many challenges and successes. I understand how hard it can be to start a food truck.

 

JC: When Renshaw started, he was excited about the idea of using a truck to connect with people with different backgrounds.

 

JR: So in that way we are able to see folks from all different life experiences regardless of where they lived, how much they made, or what their daily routine was.

 

JC: However, Running a food truck is hard, because Renshaw has to get many permits and inspections to operate it.

 

JR: Because everything is so tightly regulated. It’s clear on the website where you have to be, but the steps needed to make this happen to be incredibly hard to overcome, if you are familiar with how permitting processes work.

 

JC: The permits Renshaw mentions include the health permit, fire permit, food truck permit, hawker and peddler permit, and so on. Other steps include necessary paperwork and annual inspections. The inconvenient assigned location and low traffic make it harder to reach customers.

 

JR: What we found was one of the truck sites wasn't actually that close to the bus stop, so if I was transferring buses, I wouldn’t get across the street to get something to eat and then go back to cross the street to get our bus. I'll just wait for the bus.

 

JC: Because Renshaw can't rely only on the food truck to make money, he had to change his business techniques. He now runs the truck only two days a week and serves quick breakfast and lunch in a cafe in Dorchester, where the team sells bacon, salad, sandwich, homemade soups and more, made with real vegetables from local farms with nutritional benefits. The truck also does catering for special events.

 

JR: I think a lot of food trucks who are just food trucks really struggle to make enough money to pay the bills, so what a lot of food trucks end up doing is they have to open their restaurants or they do catering as well. We are also a caterer. We have a food truck, but 85 percent of our business is through catering and 7 percent of our business is from the food truck.

 

JC: To provide advertising opportunities for food truck owners, Roaming Hunger, a food truck booking service based in Los Angeles, just launched a new product for food trucks to use their platform to reach customers for catering. Mircea Vlaicu, Office of operations manager, says Boston has a clear system for vendors to follow.

 

Mircea Vlaicu: If you go to the government website, I think they’ve done a really good job of creating a really good website to go find these trucks, so obviously, I think the city of Boston is trying to help market them.

 

JC: JC: The rules in Los Angelas give vendors more freedom to choose their locations and reach customers, but in Boston, catering is usually the main focus of some food truck owners.

 

MV: But also because it's harder to go and it’s more regulated to go sell on the street. I think that’s where we come in and kind of help them get additional revenue from catering opportunities.

 

JC: In Vlaicu’s words, food trucks are localized businesses with their own identities.

 

MV: You have all kinds of people. You have immigrants from other countries starting food trucks. You have lawyers or accountants that started food trucks, so there are all kinds of different kinds of people who just have a passion for food, for connecting with people and bringing what they make to the public.

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JC: Owners' diverse backgrounds and ethnicities make the food truck culture unique. Lawrence Bowdish is the director of research and issue networks with the US Chamber of Commerce. It did a report last year to study if cities in America support these small business owners. Bowdish found that regulations within certain areas are unevenly enforced in Boston.

 

Lawrence Bowdish: One of the benefits of food trucks is being able to more or less go where the business is, but If you go from Boston to say, Cambridge, you need a whole different set of regulations, a whole different set of policies, and a whole different set of things need to do for that, and that was really surprising to me.

 

JC: Bowdish also says that Boston’s strict regulations make it expensive for those with little capital to operate food trucks. He believes owners should choose their spots and markets.

 

LB: And often, if you agree or believe in the idea that a diverse supply can better serve a diverse demand, I think that’s a value that’s being missed out on in places where food trucks are very expensive or regulations are very difficult to navigate.

 

JC: Vendors support and help one another. As Laura D'arcangelo says, Trading in food is like an unwritten rule in the food truck community. In small spaces, vendors make Italian sausages, tacos, Belgian waffles, Asian noodles, Korean barbeque, Latin American stew, and more. In Boston, these kitchens from the street will continue to present a variety of dishes and offer a taste of different cultures.   

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For Food Trucks' Future, I'm Jolin Cheng.