City cracks down on "illegal" Food Trucks

[nrb]

The city is not a mall, and food trucks are not restaurants. This city is full of corporate fast food shills, and it's hard to see Toronto's food truck regulations as anything other than ridiculous and out of touch with what the people in the city actually want.

 

[TOareaFan]

The city is not a mall, and food trucks are not restaurants. This city is full of corporate fast food shills, and it's hard to see Toronto's food truck regulations as anything other than ridiculous and out of touch with what the people in the city actually want.

Somehwere along the line "food truck" became synonymous with "cool"....I have no idea how/when.....I have no opposition or negative thoughts/wishes to food trucks......but, then again, I have no thoughts about them either. I have never eaten at one, have no idea where they are and am not even that sure what the rules and regulations are.......and I have a feeling that I am not too too far from what the average guy on the street feels/thinks on this subject.

So while it is true that most people don't want over regulation it may just be because most people don't give any thoughts, one way or the other, to food trucks and their regulation.

 

[Eug]

Wow, that's just idiotic. Way to protect incumbent businesses, Toronto.

Funny how that 50 metre rule doesn't apply to hot dog vendors.

What's even stranger though is they're not allowed to sit for more than 3 hours in the same spot, and you can't have two trucks on the same block. Like WTF?!?

Also, other rules aside, local BIAs and members essentially have veto power. If anyone local doesn't want a food truck there, the application will simply be denied.

Toronto City Council is just moronic when it comes to food trucks.

Somehwere along the line "food truck" became synonymous with "cool"....I have no idea how/when.....I have no opposition or negative thoughts/wishes to food trucks......but, then again, I have no thoughts about them either. I have never eaten at one, have no idea where they are and am not even that sure what the rules and regulations are.......and I have a feeling that I am not too too far from what the average guy on the street feels/thinks on this subject.

The "gourmet" food trucks usually have much better food than the hot dog stands. And they sometimes show up in spots which may only have fast food fare or sandwich shops and the like for their restaurants. They're new and portable, and provide decent food, often better than the existing options, and hence they are "cool".

 

[rbt]

It's such a huge benefit, that most of Toronto's very limited supply of licences were not taken.

Clearly they need to lighten up somewhat on the costs/rules.

Right. Clearly the cost/rule issue is there; which is why I suggested selling them by auction. It completely removes the price problem.

The main complaint seemed to be about the rules being too strong. I'm also not interested in McDonald's, Subway, or Starbucks abandoning their $300k/year fixed store-fronts for dozens of $5k/year mobile versions parked at every intersection through the core during lunch hour.

If food trucks out-compete fixed restaurants, someone will start tossing them out as a franchise just as hot-dog carts are mostly franchised in Toronto now. Very few independents run hot-dog carts in this city.

... and food trucks are not restaurants.

I fail to see the difference between a mostly take-out sandwich shop with 5 seats and a food truck selling sandwiches with a bench nearby. It's even the same line-cook. FYI, many of the more popular Toronto food trucks are in fact spinoffs of their restaurant; Caplansky's is awesome BTW.

 

[Eug]

Right. Clearly the cost/rule issue is there; which is why I suggested selling them by auction. It completely removes the price problem.

The stupid rules are prohibitive. What's the point of a $5000 licence if you can't stay in one place for longer than 3 hours, and essentially any business in the area can veto your application? In fact, with those rules, even $1000 might seem expensive.

That's right, in the vast majority of cases, there is no point.

I betcha if the rules weren't so stupid, $5000 for a licence would be much more tolerable for these people (albeit still expensive).

 

[nfitz]

The main complaint seemed to be about the rules being too strong. I'm also not interested in McDonald's, Subway, or Starbucks abandoning their $300k/year fixed store-fronts for dozens of $5k/year mobile versions parked at every intersection through the core during lunch hour.

That's easy. You cap the number of food truck licences. Oh wait, we did, and only 1/5 of them were taken ...

 

[Torontovibe]

Only 5k In Philly a food truck license is only $150, in NYC it's only $200, in DC it's only $480, L.A it's $695, and over in expensive Vancouver a food truck license is $1,000!

Is it any wonder I do not see food trucks when I walk around the city? I assume they are out there, I just don't see them.

Why is there always so much red tape in this city? We need to relax a bit and let people do their thing.

 

[Forgotten]

It's not unreasonable. A tiny downtown restaurant in a good location might be paying $30,000 in property taxes per year, and that doesn't include rent. That tiny NY Fries in the PATH will be paying closer to $400K/year in rent and taxes.

The food truck license is only $5k. That's one heck of a built in benefit to the food truck.


The city could sell a second license without the restrictions but set the fee at a competitive rate for where food trucks want to be located. Competitive pricing could probably be achieved through auction and would likely bump the unrestricted truck license fee closer to $100k/year if not double or triple that amount. We might make the number of licenses variable as well with the rate set relative to the top bid (70%?)

You mean those hot dog vendors have been cheating the system (and on their taxes) the whole time?

Those tiny little restaurants can do their own food trucks if they think they're missing out.

If they don't think having tables adds any value to what they do, and food trucks are a better business model, no one would stop them!

Otherwise go out of business and lose your shirts already!

 

[rbt]

You mean those hot dog vendors have been cheating the system (and on their taxes) the whole time?

No, but when I looked at them in 2003 they were following the system rules to the letter. The rules themselves allow it.

While they're individually owned (so are most Subway, McDonald's, and Starbucks store fronts FYI), they work together with a small number of vendors for the product (food delivered pre-cooked per city specs, soda, and extras like napkins), part-time and full-time cooks, cart setup/teardown including towing and night-time storage, signage (group deal from a printer), and a few other basic services (training, cart sales, accounting/insurance group buy, etc.) were all available.

You can get a license, hire one of these companies to run it, and other than meeting the cities minimum obligations for the owner have nothing to do with it.

Few start out using these companies but they quickly find out they don't get a vacation, may run out of product on a busy day or have lots of spoil on a slow day, and experience numerous other difficulties if they don't.


You could easily run a food truck franchise in the same way. In fact, Caplansky's was quite public about their intention to franchise Toronto trucks a couple years ago on Dragon's Den. It's not a weird and wacky concept.

Franchising is about setting up an owner, who may have limited experience, with the tools and products needed to be moderately successful whele grabbing a slice of the pie. Branding/advertising is usually a large part of this but it doesn't need to be. It can be done as a straight service fee and not include a profit-share; hot-dog carts are as a service fee.

The result is that the product from one hotdog cart to the next in Toronto is very consistent with little variation. The city doesn't prevent sausage vendors from selling a wide variety of restaurant quality flavoured sausages (jalapeno, honey mustard, hearty beef and potato, etc.) so long as they're pre-cooked and served on a bun. How much variation in hotdog cart menu do you see?


A-la-carte had a ton of problems, but one of the most difficult wasn't the price. It's that the owners were unable to fall back on these service companies to ensure the cart made revenue when the owner was unable to cook, that they never ran out of product (or had too much) via numerous small-sized mid-day deliveries, etc.

Food trucks have most of the same issues as hotdog carts. If the rules are loosened, within a decade you'll see a rapid convergence of menu selection as a hand full of the successful owners now run back-of-house for everybody else.

 

[diminutive]

Food trucks have most of the same issues as hotdog carts. If the rules are loosened, within a decade you'll see a rapid convergence of menu selection as a hand full of the successful owners now run back-of-house for everybody else.

I don't see this as true. Foodtrucks are substantially different from hotdog carts in the size of the kitchen they're allowed and, consequently, the range of menu items they could have. Just given the size and layout of most hotdog carts you're basically limited to different flavors of hotdogs and condiment assortments.

A foodtruck can maintain things like ranges, fryers, preparation surfaces and all of the necessary sanitation resources. That gives food trucks a much bigger range of dishes they can prepare. Some foodtrucks' kitchens aren't much smaller than the kitchens at smaller Toronto restos.

Lot's of restaurants do outsource back-of-house functions like raw food prep or knife sharpening, yet they still try to compete on menu selection and originality. With even a pretty modest kitchen, 10 different chefs could take the same selection of basic prepared ingredients and prepare several different dishes by modulating relative ingredient quantities, cooking method and seasoning. A hotdog cart, whose only real appliance is that hot-dog-roller thing, can't do that.

I swear to god, the Woking-on-Wheels at UofT must have 4 dozen items on it's menu! Lots of them are variations on fried rice, but it shows how much variety a foodtruck can kick out.

In cities where food trucks have existed for longer with less regulation, I don't see any trend to convergence in the gourmet foodtruck segment. If anything, like pop-up resteraunts, they function much more like resteraunts but with lower entry costs than they do traditional food-trucks and hotdog cats.

P.S. I'm sure foodtrucks could cut costs by outsourcing most things like hotdog carts, but they're also charging a premium over 'traditional' food carts because they don't do that. These trucks charge >8$ for a a few tacos. That's way more than your typical hotdog truck or cart. Customers are paying for creative dishes. That was the reason gourmet foodtrucks (and popups/undergrounds) became popular in the first place, with (then) unique menus like Mexican-Korean.

 

[rbt]

I don't see this as true. Foodtrucks are substantially different from hotdog carts in the size of the kitchen they're allowed and, consequently, the range of menu items they could have. Just given the size and layout of most hotdog carts you're basically limited to different flavors of hotdogs and condiment assortments.

Yes, they have very different kitchens. I was looking at it from the logistics of stocking, advance prep (many of the busier ones use restaurant kitchens), staffing, and that kind of thing.

Some independents do very well with food trucks but they quickly hit a wall when they begin trying to prep 300 covers in their truck for the day and begin requiring a professional kitchen (your home kitchen is illegal for commercial food prep). The trucks which are frequently in the right place at the right time with lots of product and staff for a crowd tend to be associated with restaurants. It's a necessity.


Anyway, my entire point in this conversation is that if we loosen the rules around where food trucks may operate (competing directly with brick & mortar storefronts) then they will become exactly like those brick & mortar storefronts because those companies will begin to franchise food trucks; and will continue to do it better and be more profitable than the independents.

I'm not against that. But don't be surprised when large chain trucks start rolling around downtown. The day you allow an independent coffee truck to park itself infront of a Starbucks brick & mortar shop at a lower cost per customer point is the day Starbucks starts putting together trucks of their own just to protect their existing business; and they'll do it better and with hire profit than the independents.

 

[diminutive]

Some independents do very well with food trucks but they quickly hit a wall when they begin trying to prep 300 covers in their truck for the day and begin requiring a professional kitchen (your home kitchen is illegal for commercial food prep). The trucks which are frequently in the right place at the right time with lots of product and staff for a crowd tend to be associated with restaurants. It's a necessity.

Most food trucks use commissaries, not restaurant kitchens. Toronto restaurant kitchens are not set up to support a food truck since they're too small, don't have much storage, are expensive to rent and don't have the facilities set up to deal with food trucks(e.g. waste removal, parking). There's no incentive to use a restaurant kitchen at all. Why pay for rent in Parkdale when a commercial kitchen in Hamilton or Ajax which can handle all your other needs as well?

Anyway, my entire point in this conversation is that if we loosen the rules around where food trucks may operate (competing directly with brick & mortar storefronts) then they will become exactly like those brick & mortar storefronts because those companies will begin to franchise food trucks; and will continue to do it better and be more profitable than the independents.

I'm not against that. But don't be surprised when large chain trucks start rolling around downtown. The day you allow an independent coffee truck to park itself infront of a Starbucks brick & mortar shop at a lower cost per customer point is the day Starbucks starts putting together trucks of their own just to protect their existing business; and they'll do it better and with hire profit than the independents.

Right, but there's no sign of that actually happening anywhere else. In American cities with more liberal food truck regimes you don't see many franchised trucks at all.

You could apply the same logic to any segment of the food industry; chains should in theory always be more efficient and able to out-compete one off restaurants. Not just in terms of McDonalds, but things like the Mark McEwan or O&B empires out-competing independents. That doesn't happen, in part because restaurant investors are shockingly okay with loosing lots of money, and in part because consumers show a strong preference for non-chain outlets.

Interestingly, the photos you posted of large chains using food trucksare quite different thing entirely. Those are temporary promotional endeavors. For instance, the McDonalds free coffee truck goes to all sorts of events just to get people to try McDonalds coffee. Likewise, the Burger King trucks were part of a nearly billion dollar effort to refresh the brand's menu and image. They're not competing for anything, they're actually loosing tons of money on these trucks just to get brand exposure.

It would be next to impossible to shove a McDonalds kitchen inside a food truck and insure the kind of quality control the management would expect. You'd have to have a drastically pared back menu, which almost defeats the entire point of a fast food franchise. And for what? Gourmet trucks are already more expensive than your typical BK/McD/TB. It's not like Fidel Gastro's is undermining Taco Bell on price.

 

[gabe]

Well, that was short-lived

King West Eats, the downtown food-truck hub that was making everyone feel optimistic about Toronto’s street-food future, is no longer a thing. According to a report on the Toronto Food Trucks website, Allied Properties, the company that owns the lot at 7 Morrison Street, decided to abandon the three-week-old project when a really great opportunity came along to turn the concrete strip into a private parking lot.

http://www.torontolife.com/daily-dish/food-news/2014/08/05/king-west-eats-food-truck-hub-closed/

 

[NorthYorkEd]

During a recent walk downtown we were at city hall and bitching about how ugly it is. A sea of concrete, and it looks like they are adding to it with more ugly bland concrete. Nothing but rundown shitty-looking food vendors serving hot dogs, hamburgers, sausages and fries. Wow, what a variety of interesting foods...sheesh. Seriously, we need to up our game.

 

[Jonny5]

City parks are not the ideal place for food trucks, according to Caplansky. “People who go in parks are unemployed people, people walking their dogs or people looking to score sex or drugs — not people looking for food,” he said.

Interesting comments. People don't go to parks looking for food because there isn't any there. But if there were...