The Call Of The Food Truck -- A Way To Finance A College Education

The Call Of The Food Truck A Way To Finance A College Education by: Alison Damast on September 10, 2014 | 0 Comments Comments 200 Views September 10, 2014Babson student Jack Barbers food truck business makes goodJack Barber used to spend his free time scoping out the many food trucks in Boston when he arrived in the city as a college student three years ago. Food entrepreneurship was in his blood his grandfather founded Barber Foods, a company that prepared chicken dinners – and he had the family culinary itch. There were no food trucks he knew of in Maine, so Barber and a high school friend, Ben Berman, decided to start their own. They launched a  simple business, selling hamburgers out of a food trailer parked at Scarborough Beach State Park in May of 2011.Three years later, Barber, now a senior finance major at Babson College in Boston, Mass., is in charge of a mini-food empire called Mainely Burgers. He and his brother, Max Barber, also a Babson student (Berman ha s since left the company), own two food trucks, including an ice-cream truck called Mainely Treats, that travel around Portland, Maine during the summer months.â€Å"It’s been a way for me to come home to Southern Maine every summer,† he said. â€Å"I love where my family lives, but unfortunately there are not a lot of internships that can get you a job or job offer.†UNDERGRAD BIZ STUDENTS GET IN ON A MAINSTAY OF MANY AMERICAN CITIESFood trucks, a truck converted into a mobile kitchen, and more stationary food carts have become a mainstay of many American cities in the last decade, popping up outside office buildings, parking lots and city parks. People with some form of culinary training and restaurant experience are typically the ones behind the wheel, but increasingly entrepreneurially-minded undergraduate business students across the country are trying to break into the crowded market, whipping up cheesy potato latke sandwiches, waffles, burgers and everythi ng in between.Business majors take a unique approach to the food truck business, using the knowledge they’ve gleaned from their finance, operations and management classes, and applying it directly to their small companies, said Rachel Greenberger, director of Food Sol, an â€Å"action tank† for food entrepreneurs at Babson College, which has assisted Mainely Burger’s Barber brothers as they’ve built up their food truck business. This can give them a leg up over other foodie entrepreneurs, Greenberg said. Another advantage? They can get advice on how to launch their food business from their school’s entrepreneurship centers, an obtain seed funding from business competitions.â€Å"You don’t need a business background to cook and prepare food, but when you think about what food truck businesses need at the beginning is sales, brand awareness, and a solid marketing plan,† Greenberger said. â€Å"People who have had direct exposure to thi s may have an advantage over someone who has not because they can keep track of profits and loss, cash flow statements and those types of things.†A BOOMING BUT SATURATED AND COMPETITIVE MARKETStudents who start food trucks are entering a booming market, one that has gotten â€Å"saturated very quickly,† Greenberger said. According to a 2012 report on Food Trucks from Emergent Research and Intuit Inc., the food truck industry is expected to generate about $2.7 billion in revenue by 2017, a nearly four-fold increase from 2012. On average, customers spend $9.80 on lunch and $14.99 on dinner per person, the report said.The ravenous appetite for food trucks has helped Leigh Ann Tona, a recent graduate of the University of Delaware, become another food truck success story. Tona came up with the concept for her food truck, I Don’t Give a Fork, in an entrepreneurship class her senior year. She already had some experience working in the food industry as a manager at a caf à © in New Jersey and a store supervisor at the University of Delaware Creamery.Her professor was so impressed with her business plan that he encouraged her to enter the school’s Business Idea Pitch competition in 2011, where she won $1,000. It wasn’t enough to buy a food truck which can cost anywhere from $15,000 to $100,000 – but allowed her to buy business cards, purchase a web domain name and focus on other branding efforts. The following year she decided to put her business plan to the test, setting up shop in a food trailer she parked in a lot near the University of Delaware campus.â€Å"I’d just spent my entire life savings on a food cart, so that was what pushed me to get the business off the ground,† she said. â€Å"I used the food trailer as a way to determine if that business concept was viable.† Page 1 of 212 »