It seems that Ottawa’s 2012 pilot program to introduce food trucks to city streets has stalled.
According to the Ottawa Business Journal, of 20 available permits, nine vacant spaces are open to new street food vendors for next summer.
This means that, of 17 vendors that started the program two summers ago, only 11 trucks and carts are operating.
The program was first put into place in order to provide curbside local, fresh, ethnically diverse food to city dwellers. It hoped to bring vendors both in small sidewalk carts, such as Gongfu Bao, located on Elgin Street, and larger food trucks, such as Dosa, parked beside Dundonald Park.
This decrease in street food availability has revealed cracks in a program that was once celebrated throughout the business community.
Food trucks are not the low-cost, high profit enterprise they are often purported to be. According to Ottawa Food: A Hungry Capital, food trucks can often cost as much as a luxury condominium, and expenses for staff wages, licensing, and off-site storage can force truck owners into razor-thin margins.
Food trucks typically do the majority of their business in the summer months, when customers are more willing to eat outside.
This means most revenue must be generated by October. Simply put, the costs of opening a kitchen on wheels versus a brick-and-mortar establishment are very similar, but the revenues at a food truck are severely limited by the seasons and weather.
As a result, food trucks need to exploit the advantages they do have and their ability to move about the city is considered to be their most attractive feature.
However, the city does not currently allow food trucks to move from their permitted location to other public places, which
effectively kneecaps their ability to capitalize on the ebb and flow of people across the city throughout the day. The truck owner’s only solace is to rent space on private property, which many owners in North American cities are forced to do.
Without mobility, food truck owners survive almost entirely on the location they choose before they can even sell their first meal. Owners must rely on self-compiled foot traffic statistics or educated guesses to choose which of the available street corners to set up shop.
The city does not make these sorts of numbers available or show any distinction between the locations (all “downtown” locations have the same rent), and so the cost of renting a space versus the traffic that space brings
becomes almost a near-total crapshoot.
It shouldn’t be a surprise, then, that food truck owners frequently move from their spots and pay listing fees for private events on days that they could be sitting in their permitted parking space. This is especially commonplace on the weekends, when most of the downtown core clears out.
This has resulted in a drop in supply of public-space food trucks, but another mode of “off-the-street-street-food” has developed to get around the issue.
Small takeaway counter spaces with limited seating have popped up around the city in underused lots, such as Tacolot in Hintonburg or Country Cookhouse in the Glebe. As food truck mobility is severely restricted, takeaway restaurant owners are choosing these small sheds over expensive portable kitchens.
The City of Ottawa cites existing restaurant owners’ fears of competition as the cause for such stringent laws around food trucks, but this seems illogical considering that restaurant owners usually do not have much say if a rival restaurant or takeaway counter opens up next door to them.
At Market 707 in Toronto, where a slew of takeaway counters have opened up in old shipping containers along one of the city’s main streets, the community and press universally praised its creation and never viewed it as damaging the local restaurant scene.
The belief that if these containers had wheels on their bottoms they would somehow obliterate local businesses is uninformed.
The city administration treats the food truck industry as if it was monopolistic and business-destroying, but in actuality, costs and regulations make the trucks as difficult to operate as any other restaurant.
It’s no surprise, then, that so many trucks are wheeling themselves out of town, if not out of business.