In the beginning It all got started in June 2009, right after I graduated Wharton business school. At the time I had actually been thinking about franchising some kind of yogurt joint – a Red Mango or a Pinkberry, which were popular in New York, but hadn’t caught on Philly yet. I was also getting interested in healthier foods and nutrition. I had just read The China Study (T. Colin Campbell), and that had me thinking about veganism – food with no animal products. Unfortunately, the franchise model is tough for the entrepreneur. The parent company really has you by the balls. In most cases, you put up $300,000 to $500,000.You buy everything, but the franchisor has the control.You lose all creativity as the franchisee. Everything is vetted by the parent company and you bear all the risk. It just didn’t seem like a good idea to me. So I started thinking that maybe I should start my own company and then maybe someday turn it into a franchise. I wanted to do it regionally, small at first and then grow an audience. But it wasn’t until a wedding that the business began to take shape. During a reception in the summer of 2009, I met up with a couple of friends I’d known since grade school – Peter Berman and Rich Lopatin. We were just kicking around ideas about how there were no healthy late-night options in Rittenhouse Square.You either had greasy diner food or lousy pizza. With so many young professionals in the area, it seemed ridiculous that the selection was so limited. Two of us had just gotten our MBAs but, with the economy being bad, our offers had been deferred.
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April 2011
That gave us a lot of flexibility, and if you want to start a food truck in Philadelphia, that’s the one thing you need.
Planning the Coup Peter, Rich, and I wrote a [business] plan. The more we put stuff on paper, the more we realized that we could do this, and really quickly, too. When we first started talking we were interested in doing healthy food. The problem is that none of us are vegetarians. The more we thought about it, the less likely it seemed we could do that. Instead, we wanted to have a good food with veggie options and healthy meats. We were inspired by Kogi, a food truck in Los Angeles. The truck, founded by Mark Manguera, offered Korean barbecue fusion. By using social networking, he really killed it. He went on Twitter, announced where he’d be that day and people drove miles and lined up around the block to eat his food. He opened more and more trucks and even