The Tastemakers

by David Sax

  On January 4, 2010, Geller convened a meeting with seventeen of the city’s gourmet food trucks in a vacant lot in Santa Monica, where he was planning on creating the city’s first vending lot on private property. Every food truck owner there, whether it was Dosa, Barbies Q, Slice Truck, King Cone, Sweets Truck, Nom Nom, or Baby’s Bad Ass Burgers, faced the same problems. Their trucks were getting towed and ticketed repeatedly—even seized—for violations that included being within a hundred feet of a restaurant or selling in one spot for longer than thirty minutes. Truck workers were routinely harassed by police, meter maids, and health department officials, with each citing different and often contradictory regulations. Geller looked up these laws and quickly realized that some of them were in violation of California’s own constitution, whereas judges had actually struck down others over thirty years before. At that meeting the truck owners decided to form an association in order to pool their resources and speak with a common voice, led by Geller. They called themselves the Southern California Mobile Food Vendors Association (SCMFVA).

  The SCMFVA launched their food truck lot the next day, with four trucks, tons of customers, and three TV stations coming to cover the event. Two days after that the city of Santa Monica showed up and shut down the lot for an apparent zoning violation, kicking off Geller’s first battle. He quickly researched the applicable laws and saw there was no substance to the zoning claims. Then, in what would prove to be a core strategy of the food truck battles in years to come, Geller got all the trucks in the association to send out Twitter and Facebook messages to their followers, already numbering in the thousands, urging them to write the Santa Monica city council to rectify this injustice and posting the e-mail addresses of councilors. “Suddenly these five part-time councilors are getting hammered with e-mails,” Geller said. “They were getting pissed. Santa Monica put us on the very next agenda meeting. In that meeting, two weeks later, they tasked their planning department to come up with a mechanism to allow street truck vending.” The harassment stopped, and within a few months the planning department agreed to offer the food trucks temporary vending permits in the areas they wanted. However, they still enforced an old rule that vending could only happen for thirty minutes at a time in one spot, an impossible situation for a food truck needing to capture a steady lunch business. “It had no connection with public safety,” Geller said. “We asked Santa Monica, ‘Why’s it there?’ ‘Because we said so,’ ” the city said. “But it contradicts California state vehicle code 22455, which allows the regulation of food trucks only for public safety.” So Geller and the SCMFVA took Santa Monica to court, where the judge ruled in their favor and revoked the time limit. It would be the first legal victory of many for Geller and a precedent for how he would use the courts to fight for food trucks everywhere.

  In the years since he founded the SCMFVA, the organization has grown to include over 130 trucks, each paying dues that fund Geller’s legal challenges to antitruck legislation across Southern California. He and his lawyers have filed over two dozen lawsuits against cities, towns, and counties and brought significant public pressure on lawmakers at every level of government. When a state representative proposed a law restricting food trucks from selling within fifteen hundred feet of any school in California, Geller went to Sacramento, had 180,000 Twitter followers send messages to the lawmaker who proposed the bill, and rallied the press until the legislation was scrapped. He is aggressive and unflinching in his advocacy—a bulldog for food trucks.

  “I’m not going to make deals,” Geller said. “I’m not going to get involved with sitting in a room with restaurant owners, splitting consumer dollars. Not going to do that. I’m going to take that hard line approach because the public’s been so supportive. I don’t look at lawsuits as aggressive. The only mechanism you have in that case is the court system. If a city says no, and we sue them and they back off, we’ll still go in and help them write regulations. What I’m saying is that you [the city] doesn’t have ultimate say.”

  Geller’s goal is to establish a legislative standard for food trucks that takes care of the necessary health and safety requirements for serving food and operating trucks while also prohibiting regulations that exist purely to curb competition or impose some arbitrary aesthetic standard. “In a perfect world there’s no associations,” said Geller. “Trucks do what they want to do, cook food for their customers, and just run their business. Why would you want to form an association and spend another five to ten hours a month fighting for the right to do what you’re doing? In an ideal world I’d be doing something else.”

  That seems unlikely, given the reality on the ground. In nearly every territory where food trucks have emerged, which is pretty much most cities on the continent, legislation has been tabled or selectively enforced that has curbed food trucks’ ability to work. New York requires truck owners to have valid licenses and permits but has capped the number of permits it issues, as did New Orleans so that they are only available on the black market. Toronto has prohibited food trucks selling on its streets and, depending on the location, private property as well. Rochester only allowed food trucks to sell from two locations, selected by lottery, and Cincinnati restricted trucks from parking in certain areas of downtown. Trucks in some cities were required to rent space in stationary commissary kitchens, whereas other cities only let their trucks serve reheated food, with nothing being cooked fresh. Some districts have levied proximity restrictions, which prohibit food trucks from parking within a certain distance—anywhere from two hundred to one thousand feet—of a restaurant or any other business selling food. In cities like Chicago this has basically banished trucks from the city center, which is rife with restaurants. Chicago also instituted a GPS tracking system so it can monitor food trucks by satellite and automatically fine them if they stray outside that boundary. One article compared their use to the tracking bracelets people under house arrest wear, but an infraction of these rules would saddle Chicago food truck operators with a $2,000 fine, which, the same article noted, is more than the city issued for possessing certain drugs.

  In other cities the inconsistency of existing laws and enforcement make legally operating a truck a Kafkaesque experience. When Dan Pennachietti opened his Italian sandwich truck Lil’ Dan’s Gourmet in Philadelphia in 2010, the process was a merry-go-round of approvals and agencies. “To the health department, to licensing and inspection, back to health, back to licensing, wait six weeks, wait for a stamp, wait thirty days,” recalled Pennachietti with exasperation. “I spent three thousand dollars on permits and those things before I could get the truck on the street.” Then he was given a prohibited street list, which was “pretty much any street that’s profitable,” and had to wait another year until a stationary vending spot opened up. After Lil’ Dan’s Gourmet opened, the health inspections began, and these were no more consistent. Once, he was fined for having a generator even though the licensing department had already approved its use on the truck’s design.

  In pretty much every one of these cities the regulations were proposed once officials, who restaurants lobbied, noticed the food truck trend gaining in popularity. When one or two trucks initially emerged they were ignored as an oddity, but once there was a substantial number, the crackdown began. When it did, the truck owners quickly realized that no matter how tasty their wood-fired pizzas or burritos, if they didn’t challenge the legislation, they soon wouldn’t be able to sell anything, and the tens of thousands of dollars they had invested in their new businesses would be lost. Whenever a city’s food trucks found their livelihood threatened, which has occurred in every single city at one point or another, the truck owners have reached out for help, often to Matt Geller.

  Geller frequently flies to cities around the country to help them set up and organize food truck associations. His travel is paid for by sponsors that include truck manufacturers like MobiMunch and the industry website Mobile Food News. In some cities the associations are informal gatherings of truck own
ers who meet regularly to discuss common problems, and in others they operate as a for-profit business. In San Francisco, which has relatively restrictive vending rules, a private company called Off the Grid formed in 2010 to create a safe space where trucks can sell their food without running afoul of the city’s regulations. Off the Grid manages over twenty locations around the city where trucks can operate, from simple parking lots to regular summer festivals with bands, bars, bathrooms, and outdoor seating. “The difference between Matt Geller and myself is that I don’t believe in lawsuits or food trucks at all cost,” said the organization’s founder, Matt Cohen, who I met one day in San Francisco at the Fort Mason Center, a federal park where Off the Grid regularly holds truck markets. Cohen also employed a professional state lobbyist and continued to advocate at San Francisco city hall on behalf of trucks, succeeding in the past few years by lowering the cost of a food truck license from $10,000 down to just $800.

  In DC’s case things came to a head in early 2011 when the city council began looking at other cities for regulatory models and focused on San Francisco. “Che [Ruddell-Tabisola] called me and said, ‘Oh shit, DC is going the route of San Francisco,’ ” said Geller, who had been advising Ruddell-Tabisola and others from afar. “They’d have to pay to be anywhere—it’d be very restrictive.” Geller flew out to Washington to help the truck owners there set up the DC Food Truck Association (DCFTA). One of the features that has defined the current trend in food trucks, especially in its early years, is the background of the truck operators. Whereas the previous generation of hot dog cart and food truck operators were most often recent immigrants, it is common to find former white-collar professionals operating the new fleet of food trucks, and most truck owners tend to be far more media and technology savvy than traditional food vendors or even restaurant owners. When it came to the DCFTA, the membership represented a crack squad of politically experienced individuals. Its first director, Kristi Cunningham Whitfield, who owns the Curbside Cupcake trucks, had a master’s degree in economic development from MIT and worked in that field for a number of years. Che Ruddell-Tabisola, who was interim director and co-owned the BBQ Bus with his husband, Tad, had worked for gay civil rights organizations for years, with a focus on the marriage equality campaign. Doug Povich, another director, passed on a partnership at a big law firm, where he still practices business and regulatory law, to help run the DC location of his sister’s Red Hook Lobster Pound truck empire, which is based in Brooklyn. Among its members the DCFTA had former economists from the International Monetary Fund, biochemists making cupcakes, and several veterans of political campaigns, including the pivotal 2008 Obama presidential contest.

  Over the next year and a half the DCFTA lobbied city hall for favorable regulations, built public support through online outreach and live events, and did all they could to influence the new vending regulations that Mayor Vincent Gray’s office had been working on since food trucks emerged on the scene. In October 2012 the mayor’s office released its proposed regulations, and the food truck owners were aghast. If passed, trucks would be limited to selling only in Mobile Roadway Vending locations, in a select number of spots that would be assigned by some sort of undetermined lottery. Other trucks would be prohibited from parking within five hundred feet of these zones, and parking infractions from expired meters would rise from a $50 ticket to $2,000. Food trucks would be banned from selling anywhere where there was less than ten feet of unobstructed sidewalk.

  Truck owners immediately cried foul, saying the regulations were little more than a capitulation to the demands of the powerful restaurant and real estate lobbies. The new laws would push the majority of trucks out of the central core of DC, where the bulk of the lunch business was. All the momentum, culinary innovation, and jobs they had created over the past three years would dry up and vanish along with the livelihoods these entrepreneurs had risked so much to establish. Several truck owners had already closed up shop or reduced the number of trucks they operated, anticipating what the proposed rules would do, and others were wary about the future. “I’m going to lose my business if the regulations go through,” said Michael Habtemariam, the Ethiopian-born owner of DC Ballers, a business that already operated two falafel trucks. “I wouldn’t put out my third truck if this passes,” he said during a busy lunch in Farragut Square, where the lineup for his truck ran ten people deep. “Here, in Farragut, they’d only allow six trucks to park”—the actual numbers were yet undefined—“the other dozen trucks here will just go out of business.” As many of DC’s truck owners told me that week, if the mayor’s proposed regulations passed, the entire food truck industry in DC would be legislated out of existence. A vote was set for some time in the spring of 2013, and the battle lines were drawn.

  The Big Cheese, DC Ballers, and the other trucks at Farragut Square took off after the last lunch customer left, and I walked around the corner to the offices of the Restaurant Association of Metropolitan Washington, where I spoke with Kathy Hollinger, the organization’s president. Hollinger came to the restaurant association midway through the battle over food trucks from the city’s film and television development office. “It’s been a pretty exhausting battle,” she remarked. Hollinger wasn’t entirely unsympathetic to food trucks. Though there were members of her association who operated restaurants as well as food trucks, such as chef José Andrés’s Think Food Group, a vocal number of the association’s seven hundred restaurant owners had nothing but ire for food trucks, and they looked to the RAMW to do something about it. These restaurants had experienced food truck customers obstructing their entrances, using their restrooms, and even eating their food truck meals on the restaurant’s patio as though their tables were picnic benches. But the restaurant’s biggest complaint came from the idea of unfair competition. Restaurants paid many more taxes and fees than food trucks did, and their businesses simply cost more to operate. “They should be held to a similar but scalable standard,” Hollinger said of food trucks. “It’s not fair for them to have the same regulations as restaurants, but currently they have nothing. They have zero. It gives the appearance that they are rogue in nature, and that’s disturbing other businesses.”

  There was a tone of disappointment in Hollinger’s voice about how the whole issue had devolved into a pitched battle, past the point at which compromise was possible. Prior to coming onboard the association, Hollinger had eaten at food trucks occasionally, though she had avoided them ever since. “I’d love for us to come together as food service providers,” she told me with a sigh. “There are trends, and any trends that exist as foodservice providers, we should embrace as much as we can without compromising our core membership.… It’s unfortunate that there’s a disconnect between restaurants and food trucks. Doug [Povich, president of the DC Food Truck Association] and I realize we should be having communication and talking. A consensus would be terrific. I don’t want to close the door and take the hard line against them.” But at this late point in the game, with a council vote pending in the next two months, proposed rules on the table that had been in the works for several years, and several highly vocal restaurateurs leading the battle cry against food trucks, Hollinger also realized that the march to confrontation was inevitable.

  After our chat I walked back across Farragut Square to Loeb’s New York Deli, a family-owned Jewish delicatessen that I’d written about in my previous book and whose owners, Marlene Loeb and her brothers, Steve and David, I knew well. They had seen the food trucks in Farragut grow from a handful to two dozen over the previous two years, and they were as frustrated as any of the area’s restaurants about it. “I almost feel like the city is in cahoots with them,” Steve said. “They take up spaces and park in bus lanes!” To them it was a question of competition. Loeb’s paid tens of thousands of dollars each month in rent, utilities, salaries, benefits, and insurance in order to keep running. And each day they looked out the door and saw food trucks paying their rent in handfuls of quarters, with minimal staff and overh
ead. They cut corners literally and figuratively, and they paid people to save them parking spots. “Just recently they had to start paying sales tax. That was a big woo hoo!” Marlene said sarcastically, slapping the table before giving me a rundown of the dozens of local, state, and federal taxes that Loeb’s regularly paid. “I’m all for free enterprise. That’s what this country has been built on, but it’s got to be fair and regulated.”

  All over the continent restaurant associations and their allies were pushing back against food trucks with every means at their disposal. Their numbers were vastly greater than the food trucks—hundreds of restaurants in a typical city vs. a dozen or more trucks—they were better funded, and their political access was well established through restaurant associations and personal relationships with politicians, who were more likely to sit down for a steak at a favorite restaurant than line up for a grilled cheese sandwich and eat it standing up. “What we see is the classic battle between a new form of business model and incumbents,” said Steve King, an economist with Emergent Research, a trend-forecasting firm in San Francisco that focused on the small-business sector. King had been researching the economics of food trucks across the country and saw how the fight unfolded at a larger level. “Because they can’t fight back at a business-model level, the incumbents are fighting back at a political level. Food trucks snuck up on the restaurant industry. The food truck industry tends to win initial battles because consumers love them and the politicians like the idea of them because they bring vibrancy to neighborhoods. They’ve got some natural allies and were able to take advantage of that.” In the long run, however, the restaurants and their allies can press the fight with more force. “Now it’s the empire strikes back,” King said. Still, he believed that the food trucks would ultimately prevail. “No industry has fought off a good business-model innovation through the political process. If you look at the battles going on, it’s the classic industry in the back room, saying, ‘You’ve got to protect me, I’m paying your taxes, I’m paying for your campaign’ and in the front room you have voters saying, ‘We want food trucks.’ In the end the voters win, and innovation wins.”