Steph smith’s food truck revolution
Originally Posted on Stephsmithreal.com
Americans love choice. We prize our independence. We vote with our dollars and our choices and we project how we see ourselves onto where we eat and who we spend our time with. It’s in our DNA. We’re voting to support the version of the community that matters to us. In the inevitable rush towards homogeneity, food trucks are American defiance. Food trucks are hope. They’re a window into the soul of America, they’re entrepreneurial test kitchens, they’re food fortune tellers, allowing the culinary future to reveal itself through a more affordable business model, food trucks are trend and tastemaking incubators. Food trucks always portend the next generation of dining.
Upward mobility isn’t easy in the 21st century. Surely, harder to do with your hands, a work ethic, and some natural talent and passion. Food trucks are one pathway open to someone who wasn’t born on 3rd base, someone like a single mom who loses her job and takes to making her grandmother’s salsa recipe in their kitchen, selling it to friends and neighbors, gets picked up by a food truck, then finally opening her first food truck and then a taco stand. The American Dream, accessible to everyone.
Food truck hits have been the singular bright spot for the Covid-decimated restaurant industry. Uniquely set-up to survive global events that limit or outright ban indoor dining, food trucks have lower overhead than traditional restaurants and offer convenience and safety for customers who want to pick up hot food.
One of the most cited challenges is a gender imbalance. The real estate industry has a male-dominated reputation, which has led to very few women in senior positions.
Located in Central Los Angeles with easy freeway access, Sunny Days Commissary is a 4-acre food truck facility entirely powered by LA’s sunshine. Smith, a committed environmentalist, and economic advocate envisioned more than just a food truck facility. As her vision for Sunny Days evolved, so did the list of must-haves. Smith’s Sunny Days Commissary in Los Angeles supports over 200 food trucks and a second location in Grand Terrace, California is already under construction.
The cost overhead required to run a food truck compared to running a restaurant is the difference between surviving COVID-19 and needing to close permanently. A food truck needn’t worry about wait staff or about room for their diners. And because food trucks are convenient and since relatively few of them live their lives in a commissary, they offer nearby, convenient, and safe places to secure warm meals without needing to take a chance on one of the restaurants that are open or expose oneself to the food delivery person. Food trucks also can transcend food deserts and service communities that are outside delivery zones or that have fewer food options. Even before the food truck revolution, lunch wagons, taco trucks, and mobile canteens services work and construction sites in many cities and towns across the country.
“I saw early on that the pandemic was an extinction event for traditional restaurants,” says Steph Smith, an industrial real estate developer from Pacific Palisades, California who spent nearly 20 years working in the restaurant industry, “But food trucks had an innate immunity to the economic effects of lockdown.” According to Smith’s research, the thing the post-pandemic food truck boom desperately needed was precisely her wheelhouse: industrial real estate.
No other food truck commissary park in the US besides Sunny Days has a revolutionary solar-powered non-pollutionary high-capacity ice machine, generating ice cubes and ice flakes to the tune of 40,000 pounds of ice per-day thanks to Central Los Angeles’ endless sunshine.
