Fried Chicken Truck or Bust? The Adventure Begins

After coming home from a trip to Phoenix with a bee in my bonnet about starting a new food truck business - a FRIED CHICKEN food truck business, we both knew we had a lot to learn to see if it was even a possibility.  

It sounded like a fun idea, and we knew about running food businesses and cooking and serving professionally, but what did we really know about food trucks?  It turns out - not much! All we really knew about them was that food trucks were an up-and-coming "thing", hugely popular in some parts of the country, and growing more popular almost everywhere.  

We knew nothing about their specific popularity in Arizona, or locally, about regulations for them, costs, etc. I hadn't even eaten from a food truck since my college days in Providence, RI in the 1970s, where Haven Brothers was the go-to spot for the late-night crowds.

So we immersed ourselves in the Internet as a start. We joined food truck discussion groups. We collected food truck web sites. We trolled food truck chats.  We bought several (actual paper) books about food trucking. We spoke with the few food truckers we could find in the area.  Yes, we even watched the movie "Chef" (finding it highly unlikely, despite our naïve state) and traveled across the state to attend food truck festivals. We learned a lot about food trucking - and liked what we learned.

Next, it was time to explore the world of Fried Chicken Food Trucks.  

What we learned surprised us enough for us to question the very basics of our venture's premise. The first thing we learned was that there just aren't that many mobile fried chicken food trucks out there.

Oops, this truck is now out of business!

There are plenty of trucks that serve wings, tenders, boneless breast sandwiches, or "pregurgitated" chicken patties, but very few doing bone-in fried chicken pieces.

Why is that? Was the market just not there?  Was there some barrier to making fried chicken on a truck? Or... was this a great opportunity for us to fill a need?

It turns out that the main barriers are space, timing, weight, and cost.  Conventional deep frying techniques can't keep up with peak demand without having a huge bank of fryers going all the time (no room for that on most trucks).  Then you have to balance keeping the fried chicken as fresh as possible out of the fryer without making people wait so long they get irritated.  And also without keeping so much fried up that it gets old and dry under a heat lamp and goes to waste.

It is possible to make dynamite fried chicken with a regular deep fryer (or even just a good heavy frying pan), BUT, at about 35 minutes per batch, it is all but impossible to do it in the quantities we wanted, or at the speeds we needed to achieve success. And then we learned something new.

Could the solution be as simple as a piece of equipment?? 

We learned that quick-serve fried chicken specialty restaurants almost universally use highly specialized, very expensive, computer-controlled, and VERY heavy pressure deep fryers. Invented and originally patented by Harland David "Colonel" Sanders of KFC fame himself, these fryers allow them to produce super-moist, perfectly crisp fried chicken in large batches, in about 9 minutes!

Pressure-Fryer. Price: $13,000,

48# oil capacity, empty weight: 640 lbs,

chicken capacity: 14 lbs.

Unfortunately for us, pressure fryers and food trucks are not a great match.  Ignoring the price (which is about 20 times that of a conventional deep fryer), the size and weight both make it a tough sell for the cramped quarters of a mobile kitchen.  We could not see ourselves going this route.

Another dissuader? When KFC, world-renowned for their on-the-bone fried chicken and originators of the pressure fryer, opened their first food truck, they opted to offer just chicken breast patty sandwiches, not whole pieces.  Who are we to argue?

Yes, there are a few successful real fried chicken trucks out there working every day, and more power to them! But, from everything we could learn, their methods would not work for the truck and the venues we were envisioning.

So.  Where does that leave us?  Time to re-evaluate the whole concept, I guess.