Fire Safety Licensing and Protection For Food Truck Owners
Fire Safety Licensing You will undoubtedly come across fire safety regulations. Unfortunately, food trucks can be perceived as mobile bombs, especially public perception. Assuming you have a food truck that's been built with the correct safeguards in place this is an exageration. But with that said, it is important to take safety seriously. This is your business and livelihood. There have also been some recent examples like this news report of a food truck exploding that highlights the responsibility food truck owners and manufacturers share for public safety. There are a lot of potential fire safety issues on board a [...]
Health Inspections & Commissary Requirements for Food Trucks
Health Permits When I think of health inspections, I am reminded of an episode of the sitcom Friends. In this particular episode, Phoebe started dating a health inspector. The two would go on dates to restaurants and he would find health code violations and shut down those restaurants on the spot. Eventually, she became frustrated with his power, because he had closed all of her favorite restaurants. Needless to say it didn’t end well for those two. Hollywood is known to exaggerate the truth, and that is most certainly the case here. In actuality, your local health department is there [...]
How-to Determine Electrical Power Needs of a Food Truck
You will almost certainly need electrical energy for your truck, unless you plan on vending from a hot dog cart. Even then, if you want to do anything cool you’ll want to upgrade so you have power. How much power exactly will you need for your truck? That is tricky and depends entirely on the Wattage of your equipment. Let’s do a quick introduction to the physics of electricity so you understand the terminology. When we start the build process, we work with customers to determine how much power they'll need to operate they're specific type of business. Understanding Watts [...]
The Flying Pie Guy – New Jersey Handheld Meat Pie Truck Build-Out
This afternoon we bring to you one of our recently completed builds that's about to head north to New Jersey with the current owner. The main item being sold by the The Flying Pie Guy are handheld meat pies. Meat pies are not staple menu items in the United States, but are extremely popular in the United Kingdom and Australia. Meat pies are common lunch items in both countries. In fact, the owner of the vehicle, Mike Peacock, was born in Australia. The Flying Pie is bringing this overseas tradition all the way to New Jersey with their food truck concept. Your host with [...]
Food Trends: Custom Built Tiny House Cafe's on The Rise
There are some tiny houses beginning to make big changes in the way people view starting a restaurant. But if you haven't been paying close attention, you may have missed it. The tiny house movement has been gaining steam post the-Great Recession that left many Americans out of work. This event resulted in lost homes for tens of thousands of famalies and let many to question the traditional knowledge of buying a home to invest and gain in value over the long term. If you've never seen a "tiny house" before the concept is simple. The shelter has of the [...]
Four Food Trucks Featured on Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives
The long running television show Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives started out by traveling across the United States featuring hole in the wall restaurants serving up, usually funky and always delicious foods. Since the start of the show back in 2006, the bleached-blonde Food Network Star, Guy Fiere, has been the host through 24 seasons of the franchise with no signs of stopping any time soon. As time has passed, not just restaurants, but food trucks have started to be featured in many episodes. This is a testament to food trucks truly becoming more mainstream and viewed as a destination for [...]
The Top 5 Custom BBQ Smoker Trailer Videos on YouTube
At M&R Specialty Trailers and Trucks we've had the privilege of working with over 100 custom builds for BBQ smoker trucks and trailers over our past 15 years in business. Whenever we complete a project for a customer, we like to record a video to document what the build process was like and allow folks like you to get a tour of our finished products. This post represents some of our favorite videos recorded over the past few years in no particular order. As you'll see in the footage below, we've had a wide-range of custom requests for BBQ smoker [...]
How to Make it In The Food Truck Business Podcast
The owner of a "Food truck" poses on November 9, 2012 in Paris. AFP PHOTO BERTRAND GUAY (Photo credit should read BERTRAND GUAY/AFP/Getty Images) The popular NPR radio program and podcast Planet Money recently re-published their episode titled "How to Make it in the Food Truck Business" last week. This episode spotlights how a reported thousands of food trucks and cart owners compete for the stomach share of workers and tourists that walk the side-walks of New York City. Now the New York City mobile food market, or Manhattan more specifically, is probably unlike any other in the [...]
TremendousQUE Custom BBQ Smoker Video Tour
Bob Pierson, who is usually the star of our videos, is out on vacation this week. But we had to get a video made of the TremendousQUE custom BBQ smoker before it headed off on it's journey to operate around Tampa, Florida. This video features Wade who is ex-military and with the blessing of his wife got his start cooking in local barbecue competitions and started to have some success. After about a year of researching BBQ smokers, he decided to go with M&R Specialty Trailers and Trucks for his custom build based on the experiences of our past customers. [...]
Less Vendors = Happier Food Business Owners
There's a really interesting new blog series happening on the website FromAway.com right now on the topic of food vendors, vendor relationships, and time management. To get you up-to-speed, Malcolm Bedell owner of the food trailer 'Wich, Please is sharing his lessons learned after his first 12 months transitioning from an employee working a desk job to being the CEO of his very own food business. It's a riveting read that takes readers along on the critical first year in business. You can get caught up on this series of posts below. Although Bedell's lessons in the past year have [...]