By: Lily Keefe
It’s no secret that the COVID-19 Pandemic changed lives and the way the world operates. Over the past two years, businesses have been struggling and many of them even had to close. The food truck industry is one of them, with the owners having to think outside of the box for survival.
Thinking outside of the box has saved some of these food trucks. One food truck, Blue Chip Creamery opened in 2018 and was a new business before the pandemic began. The owner of Blue-Chip Creamery, Cristina Zajac reported that in their first year of business Blue Chip had about nine to ten events, and in the following year that number almost tripled. Zajac and her husband quit their full-time jobs to be able to do Blue Chip full time, and then the pandemic hit canceling event after event.
“All of the sudden I went from having a full calendar of events to having absolutely nothing, even birthday parties and weddings that I had booked got canceled. The end of March 2020 was looking a little grim and I was questioning if I should have left my job,” Zajac said.
After some brainstorming, Zajac and her husband had a mindset shift. The Zajacs were thinking about how to grow their business during their small Easter gathering in 2020. The two and their parents produced an idea and decided they were going to set out and do deliveries, they took to taking orders online and delivering ice cream around town.
“In a time where the kids are stuck in the house and there’s nothing to do and they see an ice cream truck roll up in front of their house they think it’s the coolest thing, so it helped us for last year and this year, it was a blessing in disguise because it got our name out there and it blew up on Instagram and Facebook,” Zajac said.
While some food trucks, like Blue Chip Creamery, were able to think outside of the box and have a blessing-in-disguise moment, having an additional storefront was able to save other local trucks.
Jared Cohen, the owner of Spuds Your Way in Hamden opened a storefront just before COVID-19 hit. Since the storefront has no tables, Spuds was able to stay open during COVID-19, which was his saving grace. Normally, the biggest time of the year for Spuds is September and May because they are heavily involved with colleges and universities.
“I lost hundreds of thousands of dollars that year, but I was able to keep my books good and qualify for a lot of loans and grants through the government,” said Cohen. “The universities not being at school hurt but the silver lining is that I am from Hamden born and raised so we do have a local following.”
With the trucks typically being the money makers, the only option for Spuds was to push the storefront. “I probably would have had to close my doors so it’s kind of a blessing I did open the storefront when I did,” said Cohen.
Spuds Your Way partnered with third-party delivery services like Uber Eats, Grubhub, and Doordash which allowed them to get their name out there during the height of the Pandemic. Although some of these services can be considered “poison pills” due to the cut they take from the restaurant owners, it was the only option for a lot of these smaller places such as Spuds. In a time when people were too scared to leave their homes, it generated revenue for these smaller businesses that they otherwise would not have had.
On the other hand, other businesses such as Silver Sands Pizza located in Milford and Wallingford do disagree with using these third-party drivers. The owner of Silver Sands Pizza, Osman Tunali was charged up to 30% commission which was not sustainable for his business.
Silver Sands opened in Milford in 2011 and kept up a loyal customer base during the pandemic, but their Wallingford location had just opened in 2019, making it hard to keep their new customers. A lot of the businesses coming to that location were from local businesses ordering pizza for their lunch. Since remote work started and these businesses shut their physical doors Silver Sands started to lose money.
“There are times that even if we just break even, we are happy. “This has been the first time in my business that I was going down and losing money,” said Tunali.
Silver Sands heavily relied on the income from universities to keep the business afloat.
“Working with the colleges did help because we started to do lunch and dinner for the universities, we were at Quinnipiac and we were also at the University of New Haven, and whatever we lost for the summer it kind of made us gain back that business. We were soaring between 300-400 lunch and dinner orders it kept us busy and that was the plus side,” said Tunali.
Having food trucks and a loyal customer base is what helped Silver Sands stay afloat. Similarly, having a physical location is also what helped Moon Rocks Cookies based in Hamden. Although Moon Rocks is primarily a brick-and-mortar operation it did hurt their business to not be able to be getting out there as much, since the truck was their form of marketing and was about 20/25% of Moon Rocks’ income.
“When the pandemic hit every single food truck date canceled, so I panicked. The store was never shut down because we don’t have seating and we were always take out. The food truck was done it sat idle for many months with everything canceled,” said the owner of Moon Rocks, Marni Esposito.
What hurt Espostio was the cost of supplies. As primarily a gift basket company, the prices needed to be raised, and Esposito feared the backlash.
“I was so nervous about changing the price I hired a business consultant to walk me through the pros and cons of raising the prices and how to do it, she alleviated a lot of my fears about raising the process, and pretty much everything she said came true,” said Esposito The prices went from $30 a dozen to $35 a dozen, and for a dozen and a half, it was $40 to now $45 a dozen. These prices had to be raised due to the increase in the prices of supplies.
“The sleeve for a tray that the six cookies come in went from $88 a case to $198 a case and the little wax bags that we put the cookies in for the truck quadrupled in price and are no longer available,” said Esposito. “I turned into a hoarder and now have 18,000 of them on hand, our store looks like a warehouse with boxes everywhere, but I had no choice.”
Moon Rocks is not the only business that struggled due to the increased prices of supplies. Jennifer Brault, the owner of Lobster Tails in Wallingford had the same issue.
“Things are costing two to three times more than they were two years ago, it’s totally insane,” said Brault.
In 2019 and 2020 it cost Brault around $80 to fill up her pickup truck, gas cans, and generator and now it is costing her $120. Along with that, the price of frying oil went from about $19 for a five-gallon jug to $39 a gallon. As a business selling lobster, the main concern was the skyrocket in the price of that as well. Brault was paying $21.95 for a pound of lobster, and just last month Brault paid $45 a pound.
“It makes it very hard to stay afloat. I basically don’t make a profit on the lobster just so I can remain open. You must learn to adapt to the situation and learn to cut corners or offer something else to try to make a profit,” said Brault.
Spuds Your Way, Blue Chip Creamery, and Silver Sands Pizza ran into similar issues.
“Prices are an absolute joke right now, for instance, a case of 1,000 gloves that you’re required to wear to prepare food used to be $30 and those same cases of gloves were upwards of $90,” said Cohen.
Blue Chip’s issue was coming from the price and shortage of the clamshell freezer-safe containers. At the beginning of last year, Blue Chip was getting a case of these containers for $35 until they started noticing their manufacturer was running out and they had to go with a different one, and now where a case was $35 last year, they are over $100.
For Silver Sands Pizza, the pizza business must change vendors often due to the increase in prices and the shortages in their ingredients. Not only did the prices of supplies go up, but the people who had the last of the supplies jacked the prices up tremendously.
“We were buying chicken for $40 a case and now this morning the same case came out to be $138. This is just one case, and we use about ten of those a week. Along with that, the main ingredient for dough, flour went up too. We were paying about $17 and now we pay $27,” said Tunali.
Luckily, these five businesses made their way through the pandemic, unlike other food trucks that had to turn to closing down their businesses and having to sell their trucks.
“The food truck industry did not do well during the pandemic they lost a lot of business, especially people who only have a food truck. I’ve never seen so many trucks for sale because they couldn’t run their trucks and they were selling them on Facebook or Craigslist,” said Tunali.
With all the struggles these local food trucks have been having, they still made it through. It took hard work and perseverance and a lot of outside-of-the-box thinking. These businesses did the best they could in a difficult situation. From raising prices, focusing on waste and trying to reduce it as much as possible, and coming up with creative solutions, the industry has changed more than it ever has before.
“In terms of the food truck industry, I think it is kind of at its peak. I think food truck operators have to get creative about where they’re going,” said Esposito.
From one food truck to the next it’s all about persevering through the tough times and making what they had work.
It is truly a mindset shift from one way of life to another and “Overall people got creative and found ways to make it work,” said Zajac.
*note- all photos in article and in the videos if not taken by me were used with permission from the owners*