Living West Michigan
Wheels of Wonder: Let's Go to Food Truck Fridays in Grand Rapids!
Clip: Season 1 | 5m 1sVideo has Closed Captions
Join us as we take a look at the Food Truck business in Grand Rapids!
Supporting local business while enjoying every bite. It’s Food Truck Season in Grand Rapids. Some may own a restaurant and use this to expand their business, for others this is their opportunity to simply share their creations. Join us as we take a look at the Food Truck business!
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Living West Michigan is a local public television program presented by WGVU
Living West Michigan
Wheels of Wonder: Let's Go to Food Truck Fridays in Grand Rapids!
Clip: Season 1 | 5m 1sVideo has Closed Captions
Supporting local business while enjoying every bite. It’s Food Truck Season in Grand Rapids. Some may own a restaurant and use this to expand their business, for others this is their opportunity to simply share their creations. Join us as we take a look at the Food Truck business!
Problems playing video? | Closed Captioning Feedback
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Learn Moreabout PBS online sponsorship(upbeat music) - The food truck industry, I believe, is vital to the Grand Rapids community as a whole because it's made up of small business owners.
To me, food trucks are about as local as you can get when it comes to the community.
Nine times out of a 10, when you go support a food truck, the owner is working directly on that food truck.
Whereas you might go to a restaurant and it might be 50-50 that the owner's there, or you go to a franchise restaurant and almost 0% chance that the owner is there.
So you really are gonna interact with the actual owner of that business and that just proves you can't get much more local than that.
(upbeat music continues) So the great thing about food trucks is that it allows people kind of an entryway into following their passion of culinary arts.
So having a brick and mortar and a restaurant, there's so many expenses that you don't really realize.
It costs anywhere from 100 to 200 plus, thousand dollars just to open a restaurant.
Whereas a food truck, you can get into that same experience and only have a price tag of around 30 to $50,000.
So it's a much more accessible way for people to get into the food industry and allow them to kind of follow their culinary passions.
(upbeat music continues) Back in 2016, when we worked with the city to develop food truck ordinance and the food truck laws, here in Grand Rapids, there were only 10 licensed food trucks.
Now, we are just under 100 licensed food trucks in Grand Rapids so that's huge growth, and we only expect that trend to continue to grow.
(upbeat music continues) As a food truck, we can go to the clients, we can go to events, we don't have to wait for the public to come to us, as a brick and mortar, so that really has a huge benefit for anybody that has a business, being able to travel to your customers.
(upbeat music continues) Through my company, GR8 Food Trucks, Great Food Trucks, we put on most of the food truck events here, in Grand Rapids, including Food Truck Fridays.
This year, we started on May 17th, and we go for 11 weeks, until July 26th, every Friday from five to 9:00 PM.
So every Friday we are here, pretty much all day, getting the whole thing set up.
And then the trucks start rolling in around one, two in the afternoon.
We do setting up for a couple hours and then it's come five o'clock, it's go time.
The public is here by 4:30, waiting for the trucks to open.
And then come that six o'clock hour, dinner rush, we are packed and we have, seems like all of the community here, out with us.
And then we go for solid dinner rush until about 8:30, 9 o'clock.
And then we spend the next couple hours packing it all up and then put it away, just so we can do it again the next week.
(upbeat music continues) So this year we have over 50 food trucks that are in rotation, coming to our Food Truck Fridays.
And out of that 50, we rotate out every week, about 20 different food trucks.
We try to keep a good balance between some of the veteran classics like Patty Matters, Burger Food Truck, Pressed In Time, that does American Tex Mex.
We have Saladino Smoked Barbecue, Two Bones Barbecue.
And then also in the mix we have a lot of new faces, so we have a lot of new trucks that have opened this year.
Cheezy Duz-It is a new grilled cheese truck, we have several new taco trucks that have opened up.
We have a new one from, the owners of Dune Buggy have actually expanded and opened a second truck called Boujee Bowls, that's they make gourmet rice bowls.
We basically kind of have something for everyone, all the way across the board.
I absolutely love what I do.
The things that are great about it is that one, you're outside, it's constantly moving, constantly evolving.
You constantly have hiccups coming along the way so you never really know what is gonna happen.
And that air of unpredictability is kind of fun.
Certainly beats sitting at a computer all day doing the same old, same old so I wouldn't change it for anything.
(upbeat music) - Celebrating vibrant people, captivating places, and remarkable things.
This is "Living West Michigan."
(upbeat music continues)
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Living West Michigan is a local public television program presented by WGVU