The significances

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.