The favorite
mobile lunch spot
gets an upgrade.
redesigning
food
trucks
by rachel z. arndt
4
illus Tra Tions by
alex pang
1
6
3
5
2
food trucks
may be riding the
Twitter-crazed foodie
wave, but their design
hasn’t yet caught up.
They plug along in old
mail trucks and standard food carts, which
are functional but
boxy. They’re expensive, too: A new ride
from AA Cater Truck,
the largest American
manufacturer of
food trucks, goes for
$124,000 and can top
$250,000 with modifications. In a quest for
a true Transformers-meets-foodie marvel,
we tapped owners and
designers to rethink
the restaurant on
wheels. “It means
thinking about compact spaciousness,”
says architect Jennifer
Siegal, who taught a
class on food-truck design at the University
of Southern California
last fall. “Making it
more of a place instead
of, essentially, a hole
in the wall.”
Heating
To keep people flocking to
trucks in colder months,
Thomas Degeest, founder
of new york’s Wafels &
Dinges, would install heat
lamps [ 1]. “in the winter,
our business really slows
down,” he says.
Seating
no more trudging back to
the office with lukewarm
food thanks to tables and
chairs [ 2], which make
the truck what siegal calls
an “expandable space.”
one of her students, Vikki
Chan, imagined a mozza-rella-serving truck with
slide-out tables. “The elasticity of the ingredient is
reflected through the shell
that allows the section to
extend,” Chan says.
Display case
With a display case that
juts out from the truck [ 3],
customers can check out
their options while in line,
cutting ordering time. That
already works for beverly
Hills–based cupcake-truck
sprinklesmobile, says
designer andrea lenardin.
“it became clear that the
display had to position
itself right in the customer’s space.”
Solar panels
lenardin dreams of a
truck with photovoltaic
cells on its roof [ 4]. That
bonus energy could make
it easier to keep many
appliances running at
once, says natasha Case,
co-owner of ice-cream
truck Coolhaus in l.a. For
an extra punch of green
energy, the truck’s fuel
would be replaced by
cooking oil after it’s been
used to fry crispy treats.
Adjustable
service window
a sliding door lengthens
the service window [ 5]
to make room for more
servers at peak hours.
“The biggest problem is
really how to communicate
with the customer,” says
susie loewenstein, a stu-
dent in siegal’s class who
designed garden lab, a
traveling teaching garden.
Wood-burning oven
Though food-truck chefs
in Chicago, by law, can’t
actually cook in their
trucks, gaztro-Wagon’s
Matt Maroni says his ideal
ride would have a wood-burning pizza oven [ 6].
but, he says, cooking
restrictions aside, “it
would be tough to have a
hot, open flame.”
Extendable arms
“We could have those
‘go-go gadget’ arms
with wheels to get
through traffic [ 7],” says
Case. lynn Kim, one of
siegal’s students, had the
same idea and designed
a doughnut-serving truck
that straddles cars to
bring treats to drivers
and can also free itself
from traffic jams.
