Food Trucks:
Roaming Between Passion and Challenges
Johnathan Moy, owner of Moyzilla Food Truck, spent his birthday on his truck on April 5.
Photo by Jolin Cheng
Main fees:
Annual health permit fee: $100
Fire permit inspection fee: $110
hawker and peddler license fee: $62
Business certification filing fee: $65
Annual application fee: $500
Total: $837
Cost of sites varies depending on each owner's business plan.
Owners need to submit their business plans to the city. The plan is required to include at least one healthy meal option. Owners also need to explain how their trucks practice environmental sustainability such as recycling or using locally sourced ingredients.
Boston has 21 public sites for food trucks. To park on private sites, owners need to get the agreement from the property owner and submit several documents to the city for approval. Other special sites include Rose Kennedy Greenway Conservancy, SoWa Open Market, Mass Bay Transportation Authority, and Friends of the Public Garden.
Johnathan Moy and his three employees were busy cooking in a truck, all in black T-shirts with a Monster logo, holding a dumpling in one hand and chopsticks in the other. Linh Nguyen took orders from the window. The dumplings, packed in advance the night before, were neatly placed on a huge plate. Moy put the signature pork and napa cabbage dumplings in a plate. The meaty smell, mixed with the sizzling pan, filled the truck. At the bottom of the small box was chow mein. Linh spread the dumplings on top, drizzled some sauce, and handed it to a customer.
In 2014, Moy became the owner of Moyzilla Food Truck by selling homemade dumplings with his family. Back then, Boston had fewer than 20 food trucks. Today, more than 80 food trucks roam the streets.
“We have one truck and it’s literally me, my wife, and my dad who worked probably the entire summer no days off, with 90 days in a row just trying to get our revenue and name out there,” said Moy.
The Challenges
Food Truck Nation, a report published last year by the U.S Chamber of Commerce, ranked Boston the most challenging city to run a food truck, out of the 20 cities that were studied, due to procedures and restrictions.
According to the report, food truck owners must first apply for a number of permits and licenses. They normally have to follow 32 procedures and make 22 trips to government agencies. They also have to pay the city government around $17,000 in start-up costs, nearly 29 times the fee paid in Indianapolis. In addition, the annual fee to run a food truck in Boston can cost almost $38,000, compared to around $5,000 in Portland.
“All my experience with city halls, they don’t always have all the answers, but I think that if you do enough research and talk to the right people, you can get the answer you’re looking for,” Moy said. “When we first get started, I had no idea of what a hawker and peddler license was, or what time you can be at location.”
Moy believes that the city is trying to help vendors. Five years ago, the City of Boston’s website added detailed tutorials about forms and procedures. Vendors can now easily understand the requirements and follow steps to start food trucks. However, some owners still have to deal with other concerns about the regulations regarding locations and parking.
“In the city of Boston, food trucks are highly regulated,” Jackson Renshaw, co-founder of Fresh Food Generation said. “People have to get at least five permits to run a food truck. Food trucks only go to certain sites seen appropriate by the city. They can only be on one site three days a week.”
Renshaw became passionate about social justice and the way people eat, due to his previous experience working at the Food Project, a development organization dedicated to promoting sustainable agriculture. He worked with Cassandra Campbell, the other co-founder, to start the Fresh Food Generation food truck, which provides healthy and affordable food options for people in all neighborhoods.
However, Renshaw found it hard to balance his passion for healthy food with the city’s strict regulations.
“What I found was, when I was working on the farm, often times the food that we grew ended up going to high-end restaurants or didn’t even geographically make it into the neighborhoods, where the price is seen as too high for residents,” Renshaw said.
When food trucks were first introduced in the city in 2010, legislators intended to use them as vehicles to bring more healthy options to poor neighborhoods. Then-mayor Thomas Menino even created Boston’s Office of Food Initiatives and launched the first-ever Food Truck Challenge, looking for trucks with healthy and innovative menu options.
Although Boston still asks for healthy options and environmental sustainability, the focus has shifted from innovation to more understanding between city officials and food truck owners over the years. Meanwhile, concerns from restaurant owners about the competition pressured legislators into carefully restricting trucks from selling similar products with any brick-and-mortar restaurants within 100 feet. Some assigned low-traffic locations, along with unexpected incidents, can hurt vendors’ sales.
“If you don’t cater, you won’t survive,” said Keith Schubert, owner of the Taco Party food truck.
As a vegan, Schubert wants to promote more plant-based options for people in Boston. However, he now doesn't have much confidence in the food truck industry, after experiencing the difficulty of earning a profit.
“There are not enough spots to put a second truck. The machines always break down. With all the financial headaches, it’s not interesting to me,” Schubert acknowledged.
Boston uses a lottery system to decide parking spots. The city holds the main lottery once per year and uses three additional mini lotteries to fill trucks in empty spots given up by vendors. Each owner can only enter one truck per year in the lottery. Every truck is permitted differently and goes through safety in the city’s inspection, due to the types of food it serves.
According to Natalia Urtubey, director of small business, the purpose of a public lottery is to make sure all trucks are permitted appropriately and regulated fairly as they pertain to the public sites. Because the public sites use the city’s parking spots and sidewalks, food truck owners have to follow regulations that are set by those departments. She added that the city doesn’t have a limit on how many sites a truck can have on private spaces, so trucks have the freedom to choose spots.
However, the problem is that many public sites, although available, are not taken by owners during the lottery process. As a result, many trucks also do business in neighboring cities, where they have to follow different rules and operating procedures. Some trucks also park at special sites, such as the Rose Kennedy Greenway and SoWa Open Market, to grow their businesses.
“Personally, there are a lot of breakfast and dinner locations that the food traffic isn’t necessarily there. Most food trucks are out for lunch just because that’s what people associate food trucks with, grabbing lunch,” Moy said.
Well-planed business techniques are thus important to food truck owners to succeed. To attract a large number of customers while confronting the drawbacks, Jonathan Moy played with different innovative combinations to reach customers. His truck has sold buffalo chicken, cheeseburger dumplings, Asian cheese tacos, and will make fried rice balls with lobsters and corn for events in the following two months.
Constantly changing the locations because of city regulations, Moyzilla Food Truck now shows up at Dewey Square twice a week. The plaza, located close to the city’s Financial District, is surrounded by high-rise buildings, with thousands of people passing by on their way to work.
The Significances
Food trucks, like those in many other cities, epitomize many small business entrepreneurs’ so-called American dreams.
Lawrence Bowdish, director of research and issue networks with the US Chamber of Commerce, described food trucks as a “perfect microcosm of a lot of the issues we are seeing in either city regulations, or other issues that are really limiting the growth of American business.”
He added that cities like Boston, with issues such as spacing and zoning, make the start-up price awfully high because owners have to pay for the zones.
Bowdish made the assumption that “Boston is trying to regulate the number of food trucks by making the barrier to enter very expensive.” He added that instead of having food trucks fight for limited spots, the attempt is to have fewer food trucks and to make sure only those with a lot of start-up capital get on the streets.
Michael Hendrix, the researcher of the Food Truck Nation report, emphasizes inequality in the food truck industry. He sees the excessive regulations as one example of a “government-imposed barrier,” which undermines the economic opportunities for people, especially the lower class and immigrants. On the contrary, wealthy, upper-class entrepreneurs usually don’t encounter such restrictions.
“Lucky” is the word Moy used to describe Moyzilla’s success. His truck is able to stay in the industry because it has an innovative menu, the whole family is involved, and Moy actively engages with customers on social media. As food trucks become more socially acceptable, they do special events such as catering, weddings and graduation parties to make up profits besides the limited hours on streets.
“I think the city really can listen to the owners and operators.” Moy said, “It seems like they are just judging it from the lawmaking perspective or they are just making rules that they think are best for food trucks. They can’t really figure that out unless they talk to us. And I think it goes both ways. We need to understand what they are coming from as well.”
The Future
Boston is working on ways to support the food truck community. Urtubey said that the city will review the current sites and look out the reasons why owners don't choose some of them.
“I think for us it’s really important that we make the process easier for residents and for truck owners. Obviously, we love this program, and we want it to be successful, so we’re doing what we can to make the process easier and more comprehensive and user-friendly,” Urtubey said.
On the City of Boston’s website, a lottery registration form takes into account food truck owners’ basic information and their ethnicity and race, age, number of employees, number of food trucks and restaurants, and so on to learn about their identities.
Urtubey said that the city wants to help owners who are minorities, women, veterans, or immigrants, to have proper certifications.
Starting this year, the city post several workshops to connect to the food truck community. They received good feedbacks that were helpful for the city to analyze ways to run the program. The city is also looking for additional locations to offer more opportunities for food truck owners.
Urtubey said the city is encouraging and supporting these food trucks, but it takes time. She envisioned a positive future for food trucks in Boston.
“When we established them back in 2011, it was seen as new and innovative, nowadays it’s very instrumental and kind of embed in the culture of the city of Boston, I think you can see that just by the growth of food trucks over time, how many people are starting new business and how we are supporting them," said Urtubey.
At first, Moy didn’t have the money to buy a food truck. He sold yakitori grills and dumplings in several food festivals. The initial idea was to sell yakitori with dumplings on the side, but he always ran out of dumplings and had yakitori left over, so he decided to focus on the more popular dumplings.
Moyzilla Food Truck now has 4 trucks and just opened a pop-up restaurant at the Seaport.
“I still wanna be on the truck,” Moy said. “We started as a food truck, no matter how many restaurants or whatever we end up doing in the future, the food trucks are always gonna be where we got our roots. Boston food truck scene is always gonna have a special place in our heart.”
Owners post their new locations on their social media for the spring food truck season, which started at the beginning of April. Photo by Jolin Cheng.
Food trucks have been facing complex regulations and discrimination since the mid-1900s. While cities use different approaches to regulate food trucks based on their unique situations, policies have been targeting minority groups since the rise of street vending.
> More about social justice in food trucks’ history