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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

food truck

FRO’s All-Electric Dessert Truck Takes Food Mobility to Another Level

If there was such a thing as a Spoon Bingo card, FRO would be a winner, ticking off a number of trends we follow including sustainability, plant-based foods, and the rapidly emerging world of restaurant mobility.

Los Angeles-based startup FRO runs an electric, solar-powered food truck that serves up vegan “ice cream.” FRO Founder and CEO Deloss Pickett was formerly with Tesla, where he worked on that company’s Powerwall battery storage product. Pickett took that electrical know-how to build out the first FRO electric truck, which houses a bank of batteries to power the company’s frozen dessert offering. The truck even has solar panels to provide extra juice for the machines to keep the batteries humming.

Because all the power is supplied by these batteries, the FRO truck doesn’t need an external gas generator or to plug into an outlet when it stops to serve customers. It’s all self-contained and can last ten hours on a full charge (with a couple extra hours provided by the solar panels on a sunny day). This zero emissions aspect is a nice bit of sustainability, but it also increases the FRO truck’s mobility.

Food trucks have been around for a long time, but their very nature is undergoing a pretty rapid evolution in the back half of 2019. In September, Zume launched its first mobile kitchen, which allows restaurants to extend their delivery footprint by placing full ghost kitchens-on-wheels directly in neighborhoods, closer to customers. Then earlier this month, Ono Food launched its robot-smoothie-maker in a van, also in Los Angeles, which can travel to different parts of the city in the same day to follow the crowds (and their money).

Think of FRO as the smaller, more lightweight next step in that evolution. Sitting somewhere between a food truck and a vending machine, Pickett told me by phone this week that the vehicle is actually classified as a cart, so it can go on city sidewalks. But it’s demure stature and self-contained power supply makes it easy to set up shop quickly on college campuses, at farmers markets or in outdoor festivals.

Once set up, FRO sells a patent-pending vegan frozen soft serve. Pickett wouldn’t tell me the exact process, but it starts with Evolution brand pressed juice to which they add some vegan stabilizers to produce flavors like strawberry lemonade and citrus chocolate. We don’t know if FRO is as good as Perfect Day’s flora-based ice cream, but FRO is building on the idea that you don’t need dairy to make a cold dessert that people will want.

One trend the FRO truck is not following is full automation. A human is still on board to pour out 7 – 8 oz. desserts for $6.00 a piece. Pickett said that they had looked at creating more of a self-serve situation, but that wound up slowing the whole process down. While having a human on board does speed things up, it does deprive FRO of deeper, software-driven data insights that it could use to become more efficient in its inventory management, and location placement.

FRO is bootstrapped right now and Pickett said he’s focused on generating revenue and learning from real world conditions before he begins the process of raising money and scaling up. Though FROs are owner operated right now, it seems like once its technology has been built up and iterated, there’s no reason FRO couldn’t license out its platform to other brands in other parts of the country. That would certainly check one more box on The Spoon Bingo card.

Forget Catering. Shake Shack Ups Its Off-Premises Game With a Food Truck for Rent

Yesterday Shake Shack introduced the world to its new food trucks, available for rental for private events.

To be clear: the Shack Truck doesn’t drive around your city and land at the nearby food truck park come lunchtime. According to the Shack Truck FAQs, it’s instead a vehicle you can rent out for private parties like weddings, anniversaries, birthday bashes, and whatever else you could think to throw a party for.

The menu is determined based on each individual event, but in general you can expect the usual Shake Shack items — burgers, fries, and, of course, shakes. Pricing also varies by event and can be determined once you fill out a form and submit it to the company.

Right now, Shake Shack has two of these trucks: one operating in the tri-state area (NY, NJ, CT, and PA) and one in Atlanta. There’s no word yet on whether the company will have more trucks or more cities available in future, though given Shake Shack’s rapid expansion pace, it’s likely. For now, if you’re in the area, the company suggests booking the truck at least two weeks in advance of your event.

What’s most intriguing about this is not that you can serve Shake Shack at your wedding (although that is pretty amazing news), but that the company has found yet another way to reach audiences outside the traditional standalone restaurant setting. Nearly all of its 200 units currently deliver, and Shake Shack outlets have long been in places like Madison Square Park, Citi Field, and, more recently, casinos like the New York New York hotel in Las Vegas.

A food truck for rent is really just another form of catering, but it’s cleverly branded catering that screams “millennial,” a generation that’s borderline obsessed with off-premises food options. Plus, around 70 percent of customers (millennials or otherwise) are predicted to be ordering offsite by 2020. That means restaurant chains will have to continue to find unique ways of providing those experiences, and a rentable food truck is certainly a good start.

The Spoon Video Top Three: Food Truck Tech, Robo-delivery and Instant Aging For Wine

It’s the Spoon’s video top 3, recaping three trending stories about the future of food, cooking and the kitchen from the past week.

This week’s we take a look at Bistro Planets’s food truck tech, DoorDash’s pilot program with Marble for delivery robots and whether or not instant aging is the newest trend in wine.

Enjoy!

For Aspiring Food Truck Owners, Technology May Be More Important Than the Actual Truck

Food trucks as a concept date all the way back to ancient Rome, but most cite 2008 as the start of the current mobile-gourmet craze when Korean-American chef Roy Choi opened Kogi BBQ in Los Angeles. Now, these mobile restaurants exist all over the U.S., have their own Zagat category, and are set to generate an expected $2.7 billion in the U.S. in 2017.

So it’s an ideal time for entrepreneurs to climb onboard and fire up the grill for their next venture, right?

Sort of. But dropping $85,000 on a truck and equipment won’t guarantee you a successful business, just like parking said truck a prime location won’t automatically win you a following of devout foodies.

Yes, it’s a great way of starting a restaurant with minimal overhead. Even so, food truck operators often find themselves in a kind of hell on wheels where parking-lot space is a daily battle (PDF), the weather can ruin an entire day’s profits, and there’s no consistent set of followers because when and where your business operates is also inconsistent. Health-code mistakes and violations are rampant. Add on the various permits, licenses, and insurance policies needed—which vary from county to county across the U.S.—and it’s little wonder that around half of all food truck businesses fold within the first year.

Enter Bistro Planet, the brainchild of tech entrepreneurs Roie Edery and Aleksey Klempner. Edery previously helped launch the medical-marijuana-delivery app Eaze, and alongside Klempner, he believes Bistro Planet, and technology in general, can eliminate many of the frustrations food truck vendors face on the job.

How do they plan to accomplish that? Through a couple of apps, of course.

The consumer-facing Bistro Planet app is what you might expect: it saves customers time and guesswork by letting them locate trucks in real time, then places, pay for, and track an order all in one place.

The Bistro Connect app, however, is the real game changer, promising to unite a historically fractured industry riddled with inefficiencies. Through Bistro Connect, food truck operators can view all available lot space in their city, book a location, and pay for it then and there. That location then gets broadcast to customers via social media, eliminating, for example, any questions about where to find the chicken and waffles truck that day.

From there, vendors use the app to notify users on their orders, manage and update menus, and process payments through a POS system designed specifically for food trucks.

Bistro Planet launched in June of 2017 in Los Angeles—the birthplace of food trucks. It’s since served over 10,000 users and seen the number of participating trucks rise to around 250. A recent expansion into all of Orange County, California suggests both those numbers will rise very soon.

Part of the company’s success can be attributed to the holistic approach Edery and Klempner took when they decided to tackle this particular market. Rather than focus on improving individual trucks, they designed Bistro Planet to change the entire market.

And they’re not alone. A growing food truck industry has attracted entrepreneurs looking to make trucks more tech-savvy and solve problem areas of the business. Square is the obvious competitor of Bistro Planet when it comes to POS systems. Tursus Software’s Food on a Truck (FOAT), in addition to offering schedule management and analytics, helps protect businesses from being held liable for fraudulent credit card charges.

Meanwhile, mobile reporting platform FreshCheq tracks temperature consistency and other food-safety tasks, then automates a report operators can share on the inevitable health department visit.

How all these different technologies will work together in the future remains to be seen. What is clear, however, is that technology’s role in the food truck business is only going to grow more important as demand for food truck cuisine increases. Maybe the biggest challenge business like Bistro Planet face is getting owners and operators to understand why they should shift their approach towards a more tech-savvy business model, be that automated health department reports or more secure POS systems. Owning a food truck is always going to have its challenges and roadblocks. But for those who join the efforts in using tech to unite the industry, that $85,000 spent on a truck looks to be a solid investment for the future.