Blaring The Horn For Food Trucks

Sitting on his sofa in the Venice section of this city, Matt Geller let out an exasperated sigh as he spoke to a familiar official from the county health department. Food trucks represented by Geller's group, the Southern California Mobile Food Vendors Association, had been caught dumping waste water down storm drains. "That's absolutely disgusting," he said. "A state, federal and county violation."Armed with his phone, a law degree and a garage packed with boxes containing health and vehicle codes, Geller has established himself as a voice for the nation's food truck movement. Through lawsuits and advocacy, he has written the playbook for how independent owners leverage their popularity to shape laws in their favor. That includes adhering to codes on waste water and collaborating with the city agencies that were once his adversaries.Geller is a bit to food trucks as Cesar Chavez was to farm workers, although he has been criticized as being more concerned about the purveyors of bacon-topped cupcakes than about the immigrant small-business owners selling traditional tacos and pupusas.Last month, he expanded his reach, founding the National Food Truck Association, an umbrella group he hopes will unify thousands of independent food trucks and dozens of local associations (he already has 10, including those in New York, Philadelphia and Baton Rouge, Louisiana). If the group gains a foothold, it will signify the rapid evolution of the business from a quirky fad to a national industry with an estimated $1 billion in annual revenue and a growing political voice.Richard Myrick, who runs the industry news website Mobile Cuisine, said, "I think the food truck industry's been ready for this since 2010."Geller, who turns 40 this fall, was raised in Venice but spent summers with his grandparents in the Midwest. "As a consequence," he said, "I grew up Venice tough, but Minnesota nice." He uses that mix to his advantage.When chef Roy Choi began the modern food truck business in late 2008 with the Kogi Korean BBQ truck in Los Angeles, Geller was a recent graduate of UCLA law school with a few years in the nightclub business. Many cities had street food, from New York's and Chicago's hot-dog carts to California's taco trucks, but the Kogi truck and the thousands of fancy food trucks it inspired upended the status quo. Rather than putting down six figures or more for a restaurant, an enterprising cook could bring his or her food to the public by buying a truck for as little as $30,000. And instead of serving simple food like ice cream or hot dogs, these mobile chefs offered lobster rolls, Vietnamese iced teas and, yes, bacon cupcakes.Laws on mobile food had not been updated for decades, and fancy food trucks quickly ran up against opposition from municipalities, in part because of lobbying by restaurant and real estate interests.In late 2009, Geller got a panicked call from his friend Don Lau, who operated Don Chow Tacos, a truck serving Chinese/Mexican fusion food. Lau's truck was impounded frequently for breaking laws and regulations he found to be confounding and contradictory. In the end, Geller was able to make changes to help his friend.In early 2010, he gathered 17 of the city's new food trucks and heard similar stories. He suggested they form what is now the Southern California Mobile Food Vendors Association, which Geller says was the nation's first such group.Then he went to court. Working with the law firm Dermer Behrendt (run by two of his friends), Geller and the association (which now has 130 trucks and a $200,000 annual operating budget) filed 10 lawsuits over three years against cities and counties all over Southern California, challenging any restriction applied to food trucks that didn't directly address public safety or health, from rules mandating a minimum distance between a truck's parking spot and a restaurant, to a bathroom access requirement no food truck could meet. He and his lawyers won every case, either by judgment or by forcing the cities to amend their laws, according to Kevin Behrendt, of the firm.Geller worked all day with city officials to shape favorable laws for street vendors, then showed up in the middle of the night to get between one of his trucks and the police threatening to tow it. He was on his phone so often, he said, he rubbed the skin off his ear.
Still, he refused to compromise. "I dismiss the notion of working it out with restaurants," he said over lunch at TLT Food, a new taco restaurant in the Wilshire area that began as a food truck in Orange County (although he didn't actually eat, adhering to a strict diet). "When I hear politicians say, 'We need to protect restaurants,' I ask: 'What other business do you need to protect? Do you protect Wendy's from Burger King?'"As the fancy food truck trend spread, Geller flew to Washington, D.C.; Philadelphia; Chicago; New Orleans; and most recently Columbus, Ohio, to lead meetings with food truck owners and testify before city councils. He walked the owners through the steps to begin their own associations and tutored them on the best way to use the food truck's popularity for political results."He really encouraged us to become an association, and you could imagine there was hesitancy," said Che Ruddell-Tabisola, executive director of the District Maryland Virginia Food Truck Association, one of the first to form after Southern California's. "We were a bunch of entrepreneurs who left the corporate world, and we all were running our own businesses."
The New York City Food Truck Association, which was formed in 2011 by former Rickshaw Dumpling truck owner David Weber, signed on to Geller's group. But the New York association has struggled to change street vending laws to benefit food trucks. "You'd think this would be the ideal place for food trucks," Weber said in a recent phone conversation. "Unfortunately, it isn't. There hasn't been the tremendous growth that there's been in L.A., Austin and Denver because of the regulatory structure. I hope that the National Food Truck Association brings some perspective in terms of understanding what types of amazing food should be on the streets of NYC."Geller's move from regional to national figure has its detractors, even among his allies. Throughout his legal battles, he has coordinated resources and strategy with the Institute for Justice, a nonprofit law firm affiliated with the Libertarian political movement, which calls for unregulated commerce in many areas and pioneered the litigation strategy on behalf of food trucks fighting restrictive city laws.When asked about Geller's move to form the National Food Truck Association, Bert Gall, the senior lawyer at the institute, said he was unsure how effective the organization could be. "I guess my question is: How complex would pulling them together on a national level be?" Gall asked.Other criticisms are that Geller's focus on nonprofit associations and fancy trucks ignores the least-powerful segments of the industry. Most food truck operators are not lawyers turned chefs, but immigrants, largely Latino, selling traditional foods, his critics contend. Their interests are not the same as those of someone plying artisan meatball sandwiches, they say, and if Geller can't bring everyone into the tent, the National Food Truck Association could lack legitimacy."From my perspective, if you're doing a national association, you need to be representative of all of your members," said Matt Cohen, the founder and owner of Off the Grid, a San Francisco-based private company that operates 150 trucks in up to 32 events around the Bay Area each week. His organization is the biggest player in San Francisco's food truck landscape, but because Off the Grid is a for-profit business, Geller will not represent the organization nationally.One of the newest associations set up with Geller's help is in New Jersey, led by Jon Hepner, who operates Aroy-D, the Thai Elephant truck, out of Hoboken. The difficulties Hepner has faced in the state, such as navigating vastly different rules in municipalities he serves, show the obstacles facing Geller's new National Food Truck Association. Many have questioned how Geller will be able to make changes nationally with so many small players. Geller says a goal of the National Food Truck Association is to help truck owners in smaller municipalities by writing laws in larger markets, like Los Angeles, that smaller cities can emulate."Food trucks don't realize how much power they have," he said as he walked around a lot he had set up in Santa Monica, where a half-dozen trucks were just starting to have lines forming on a Tuesday night. "You need to use that power right away, while the trend is on the rise."© 2014 New York Times News Service