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The Social-Savvy Food Truck Series is supported by the Ben and Jerry’s Scoop Truck. For more information on the scoop truck and where it stops, click here.
Sitting at the window table of Rickshaw Dumpling Bar‘s Flatiron restaurant, it’s hard to see why they need a food truck. The restaurant is nice, well-located (they have another in Midtown Manhattan) and the food comes out quick and tasty. Why ruin that with what is essentially just fancy-pants street food?
The answer is, because it works. Food trucks experienced a boom just as the economy started to tank. Restaurateurs who were hesitant to drop serious cash on launching a restaurant turned to mobile trucks as a less expensive way to sell food in a down economy. Social media has played a large role in not only making the trucks more accessible, but allowing them to cultivate the crucial element of community.
“It’s the social aspect,” says Kenny Lao, Rickshaw’s co-founder. “It’s really about shared experiences around food. I think what we’re doing with Twitter is an electronic version of that share.” He sees his restaurants as an older, established sibling living uptown, while his truck is like the younger brother fresh out of college and living in Williamsburg, Brooklyn — different energies toward the same purpose.
But Lao, like other food truckers, is hesitant to give social media too much credit. We spoke with the proprietors of four prominent food trucks — Rickshaw in New York, Dante’s Friend Chicken in LA, Kogi BBQ in LA, and Grill5 Taco in South Korea — about how social media helped drive the mobile food revolution, and what to look for next.
Why Trucks? Why Now?
Food trucks popped up in a perfect storm of low-cost marketing. Restaurants are extraordinarily expensive businesses to open and maintain. Food trucks, however, are far cheaper and carry far less risk. The barrier to entry is cheap, and the location can change daily (not selling well in Midtown? Move to Brooklyn or the Financial District.)
The real problem was trust. Food trucks have been around forever, but people naturally have an aversion to “roach coaches” and “street meat,” thinking it of a lower quality and lower standard than a brick-and-mortar restaurant. The influx of high-quality restaurant brands to food trucks timed well with the social media boom.
Not only were trucks striving for higher quality tastes, but they were talking to their customers, building what digital marketers call “brand loyalty.” That brand loyalty also played into the food truck ethos of “community first.” Each successful truck is a community unto itself. Social outreach helped to grow these communities and make them feel more participatory.
Still, no amount of social media can do the cooking and design work necessary to make a successful food truck. Much of the “social media” narrative is driven not by the trucks but by social media advocates themselves. Here’s what we learned from these mobile entrepreneurs.
Rickshaw Dumpling — New York City, USA
The Rickshaw Dumpling Truck serves a pared down version of the restaurant’s fare. Lao, a bit of a social media skeptic, acts as a begrudging social media manager, tweeting out the truck’s daily locations. “If everyone stopped doing it tomorrow, I would be the first one leading the charge,” he says. For him, the food — and not the marketing — is the first priority. He’s frustrated by businesses that start tweeting before they own a truck, have a permit or have cooked their food. “You can’t make a shish-kebab with an iPhone.”
Lao sees sites like Twitter as a way for food trucks, especially ones without a physical location, to feel like they have a stronger sense of permanence amidst an inherently transient business model. Building that base of followers has helped Lao seal partnerships and sponsorships while also giving a voice to the brand.
To that end, the account is a place to talk not just about dumplings but things that his audience also cares about: new songs, interesting links and cool bikes Lao sees on the street. Timing is also important. Lao likes to tweet in the morning — he figures people like to look forward to their lunch and want to track down the truck. He says sweet trucks, on the other hand, can tweet later in the day as people are wandering back to the office looking for a snack.
Now, Lao is proud of his truck and its followers. He regularly bikes to the truck to check up on it and rides along when scouting new locations. And as for social media? Nearly 10,000 followers can’t be wrong.
Dante Fried Chicken — Los Angeles, USA
Dante Fried Chicken started out as an underground dance and dinner party in New York. It quickly built street cred and uprooted to LA where the crew — lead by the brand’s eponymous chef — cooks up chicken for the masses. Joey Rubin is Dante’s CMO and friend. We caught up with him between innings at a Milwaukee Brewers game to talk shop.
Social media was a way for Dante to break into the food press. They reached out, tweeted and built a following, quickly drawing in top journalists. “Through Twitter and Facebook — through creative campaigns and the tools that we have — we made it from being completely underground New York kids throwing really awesome innovative parties … to being on the cooking channel in a matter of a few days,” Rubin said.
The truck went from a humble Gmail account with a few hundred messages to more than 2,600 followers on Twitter. The tone is still off-the-cuff and erratic, but it matches the brand perfectly. “Social media is just an extension of your brand and your persona,” Rubin says. “You can use it like you use any other tool. It’s like the tongs that Dante uses to put stuff in the fryer.”
The account stirs up the feeling of a backyard cook out, an atmosphere their fans have embraced. “Our social media is tied directly back into the experience for us,” he says. “Meet Dante, you’ll get it. Meet any of us hanging out around the truck, you’ll get it.”
Grill5 Taco — Seoul, South Korea
Korean fusion is all the rage right now, and well, the team at Grill5 can say it seriously pre-empted the curve. The South Korean truck specializes in, you guessed it, Korean-Mexican offerings. We got in touch with Ban, one of the truck’s originators.
Right now, the truck only uses Twitter to stay up to date with its followers. However, after having the cops called on them several times for causing a scene, they’re now considering a traditional storefront. “At first, I [used Twitter] to tell people just where we will be, but soon I recognized that people unfollow if someone is [talking strictly about] business or is boring,” Ban says. “So I started to tell people about my daily life, talk about movies and introduce quick recipes that I know, just like normal Twitter users.”
Social media played a huge role in the truck’s inception, and Ban doesn’t think he could have had the same success without it. Still, while Twitter was a revolutionary way to market, it has become just another tool in Ban’s belt: “I’m not saying it became less important, but social media itself became just another tool to let them know about our food. The people who communicate through it are more important for us.”
Kogi BBQ — Los Angeles, USA
Kogi BBQ has seen huge social success on the West coast with 87,000 followers and five separate trucks to do its bidding. Fittingly, it serves up Korean-based Mexican food with a healthy dash of social media. Alice Shin is Kogi’s creative director and chief tweeter. Kogi, like many of the trucks, has a website where fans can look up truck locations by day and hour. This takes some of the social media load off. Still, Shin uses Twitter when there’s a last minute change or for privately reaching out: “Twitter is great for the private DM, ’cause I don’t want to blast people with a bazillion replies a day,” Shin says.
She breaks down the strategy into sections. “WordPress for blogging, Twitter for scheduling/emergencies, Facebook for running a temperature check and just interacting with beautiful strangers.” Having so many outlets has also narrowed Kogi’s Twitter use. It is mostly for updates on the truck, while the blog is home to more general (read: esoteric) updates. One, for example, was a post about a joke tin of “Unicorn meat.”
Much like Lao, Shin says the social strategy ultimately came down to the food: “Social media does not put meat on the grill, it does not chop over a hundred pounds of onions a day or guarantee that people will be happy with our food or help us with calculating orders or cleaning down our stations and throwing out the trash.” Instead, it is a tool to spread awareness about the fundamentals of running a kitchen, whether or not that kitchen is on wheels. “Look, if you don’t have a great product to sell, if you don’t have a deep love for your work, no amount of retweeting, hashtagging or following will help you grow your business,” Shin adds.
It’s important to listen, to find out what your specific audience wants. Some may want to know your favorite band, others may just want to find your food and that’s it. But has social media actually helped Kogi? “I don’t know. I mean, I get the feeling that when asked this question, people want me to either trash social media or praise it. But when you ask a cook, ‘After all that, has your chef’s knife actually helped you?’ Sure it has! But the knife is not the food. The knife is an important, integral tool for a serious cook, but it does not imagine or create the dish itself,” Shin says.
As she put it: “Food is my business. Culture is my department. And social media is the bridge that allows for me to let those two worlds talk to one another.”
What food trucks have you seen? And why do you think social has become an important part of the mobile revolution? Let us know in the comments below.
Series Supported by Ben and Jerry’s Scoop Truck
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