​Food truck fever in Fargo-Moorhead

By Marisa Jackels

Photo by Brenda Grandbois and Erinn Bowen

marisajackels@gmail.com

Briann Grandbois was cooking up sweet potato tacos for friends when her food truck dream became a tangible vision. It was one of her new experimental recipes; sweet potatoes with black beans and red cabbage, topped with lime Greek yogurt and crumbles of queso fresco and cilantro. The tacos were such a big hit that one of her friends wanted to take some to go.

“I wrapped it up in tinfoil,” Grandbois said. “And as I did that, I realized, this would be so cute coming out of a truck!”

Fast forward to today, Grandbois is now the proud owner of Fargo-Moorhead’s newest food truck, Pico. She spends her free time preparing homemade braised brisket, slow-roasted pork, and sweet potato tacos and serving them, wrapped in tin foil, to a line of hungry customers.

Food truck fever

Pico joins a growing fleet of food trucks in the Fargo-Moorhead region and beyond, serving everything from tacos to thai nachos. While food trucks have been serving up dishes out of their windows in cities like Los Angeles and New York for years, only recently has the food truck fever hit Fargo-Moorhead. And no one’s complaining.

The trend has had a visible impact on the annual Fargo Food Truck Festival, started by Mike Schmitz and Ryan Backman in 2013. At their first event they had 800 attendees and seven food trucks. This year, at their third event on August 19 - 21, they had over 9,000 attendees and 18 food trucks.

The festival has given Schmitz a front row seat to the rise in the food truck phenomenon, he said.

“We knew it was the right thing,” said Schmitz, who created the event to bring activity to the North Dakota Horse Park where he works as general manager. Even in 2013, before the trend had really caught on, Schmitz said the idea was “knockin’ on the door.”

Food truck fever knocked on the door of Rachelle Donaldson a year and a half ago, in Hallock, Minn. Tired of the long hours, she left work in the restaurant industry to take her cooking mobile. Today she runs a food truck called Groovy Grub with her husband and daughter.

Groovy Grub is one the most popular food trucks at the Fargo Food Truck Festival, and in fact was voted “Best of the Fest” award for the second year in a row this year. Customers line up to snack on their Thai nachos, deep fried pickles, burgers and poutine.

Of all the jobs she’s had in catering, Donaldson said food trucking is the best yet. Customers are having fun, and you are in charge of the whole production.

“It’s tiring,” she said. “But it’s so fun.”

The road to food truck fame

The “Launch-A-Food-Truck” dream is not a foreign one to many aspiring young chefs. In fact, director Jon Favreau used it for his 2014 film Chef, which features him transforming an old truck and taking it on a cross-country Cuban sandwich adventure.

But to actually launch a food truck is a lot more difficult than serving up a good taco. For Grandbois, that night of sharing sweet potato tacos with friends seemed to spark a far-off dream. She’d spent her adult life studying at NDSU, then MSUM, and works as a registered nurse. She had no time to start a food truck.

And then, last November, her brother asked her a hard question.

“He asked me, what do you really want to do? What is your dream?” Grandbois recounts. “I said, ‘If I could do anything in the world it would be to open a food truck.”

Then do it, her brother said. You have nothing holding you back.

“I said, okay, I’m just going to do it.”

And she meant it. Things kicked into gear in May, when she found an old, inexpensive FedEx truck on Craigslist. That was the moment her parents took her seriously, she said.

“We drove down to East Grand Forks and bought it. And I thought, there’s no turning back now,” she said.

From there, the months were a flurry of converting the bare bones truck into a kitchen, passing health inspections and navigating the red tape of the food industry. It’s this red tape that usually halts dreams before they fully develop, Grandbois said. In fact, it nearly stopped hers, too.

“It was very overwhelming. I kind of gave up on it,” she said. “But when I first thought of it [the idea] I told everybody in hopes that that would prevent me from giving up. I felt like I had to own up to it and actually do it.”

In July, just two months after purchasing the old FedEx truck, Pico was ready for launch. The truck now included water sinks and countertops, and was painted in bright teal and yellow with a taco on the side.

They sold their first tacos on September 8, at a Bridge Bash event held to welcome Fargo-Moorhead students back to school. Pico joined other local food trucks, such as Big J’s and Blackbird, in serving up dishes to-go.

The tacos were a huge success. More so, in fact, than Grandbois was expecting. Since then she has catered a wedding, a few events, and regularly serves outside Junkyard Brewing Company in Moorhead, where she typically has a line of hungry customers.

“It has been profitable,” Grandbois said. “I still have my startup costs. It takes a while for a new business to get caught up. But it’s been a lot more than I was expecting.”

As a full-time nurse, Grandbois can’t commit to running Pico full-time. But eventually, she said, “I want this to turn into a career. I want it to be something really huge.”

Grandbois is 29 years old. Five years ago, she said, she would have never imagined she would be running her own food truck. She was a recent NDSU grad with a major in Zoology, and said she felt lost. Dreams like starting a project as big as a food truck seemed far off and unattainable. It’s one of those things people talk about, but don’t actually do, she thought.

“I wanted to know what it feels like to actually do it,” Grandbois said. “And it feels very, very good. I feel so proud of it.”