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.

Food Truckin'? Our first inklings...

"You and I NEED to open a fried chicken food truck...", I said, bursting through the door.

"Wait. WHAT??", was all Kathryn managed to get out as she rose from her chair.

"... It's the only solution!", I concluded, plopping down the bag of cold burritos and soggy tortilla chips that had ended up as our sad second choice for lunch.

That's how our big food truck adventure began. 

Here's how it all came about...

I make fairly regular trips to Phoenix for supplies. It's about a four-hour drive each way so, if I want to do it in one day, I need to start early. This trip, I also had to drop off some goat kids at the airport for flights to their new homes, so I left the Ranch at 2am to get them all checked in on time.

I was at Restaurant Depot when they opened at 7 and my shopping there took an hour, then another hour between Sam's club and a few other stops. By 9am, I was ready for lunch (I'd already put in a 7-hour day) and to head up the mountain back home. 

So. What's it gonna be for lunch?? 

I wanted something that I could also bring back to the Ranch for Kathryn, so I called her. 

"Fried chicken!" she said. 

"Perfect." I agreed

Perfect, except, have you ever tried to find fried chicken at 9 o'clock in the morning? None of our favorites in the area opened until 11.

No worries. I would pass through Payson around 11 am and knew there was a KFC there that should be open.  But, when I got there, the KFC was gone and there was a donut shop in its place!!  Noooo!  

So I called Kathryn again and told her of my mission failure. "No problem", she says. "I'll find you a fried chicken place somewhere along the way and call you right back".

A few minutes later, she called with the bad news... she had struck out too. Nothing between there and home.  BUT, if I wanted, I could take a one-hour detour to either Show Low for KFC or Holbrook, where there was a Popeye's at a truck stop. I like Popeye's, but not that much.

Seriously?? There were no fried chicken shops from Phoenix to Snowflake?  Sad, but true.

Central AZ: A Fried Chicken Culinary Wasteland

The situation was unacceptable! And I was suddenly on a mission to fix it. Thinking about this huge injustice (and market opportunity) as I drove the last 2 hours home, I decided that we should do something about it. I make some damned fine fried chicken.  Why don't WE start a fried chicken restaurant? The more I thought about it, the more I felt inspired to do this.  

But where?  I decided that there just wasn't one ideal location for it. Most spots would be good at certain times of the year but not at others. Solution: A MOBILE fried chicken restaurant!

Our next adventure? What do you think?

That's the answer then. We needed to open a fried chicken FOOD TRUCK! 

And that's exactly what I said to Kathryn as I came through the door at home.

"Wait. WHAT??..."

The adventure begins!

An Unvarnished Job Description for a Line Cook

Are you tired of the public's romanticized ideas about what a cook or chef does for a living vs reality?  Me too. It seems to have gotten worse recently, but it is definitely nothing new.

Way back in the 1980s (well before the celebrity chef craze really took hold), I was working as Food and Beverage Director (F&B) at a hotel. They tasked me to rewrite the job descriptions for the positions in my department, including all kitchen, dining room, room service, and bar/lounge positions. I was then to present and discuss them with all prospective employees to make sure they were able and willing to do the jobs for which they were applying. 

Talk about re-inventing the wheel!  Can you imagine how many times my predecessors at his property (and every other F&B manager at every other hotel in the world) had done this same task?.  I thought it was a complete waste of time but, apparently, this onerous little task was an exercise designed to make sure that every F&B was intimately familiar with each of the job positions in his department. Well, I was more than familiar, having done most of them firsthand, so I went at it.

To be honest, I did a pretty half-assed job for all the service staff positions, and the bar positions and the dishwashers, etc. My heart just wasn't in it.  But for the cooks, the job positions I knew most about, I had some fun.  I ended up sending the GM a 2-page, single-spaced typed (remember typewriters?) document.  It went something like this…

Job Description for a Cook

The primary job for a cook is preparing the food served in our restaurants. Duties and work conditions include -

• Cooks work in widely variable physical environments for extended periods of time including sub-zero degrees F while working/cleaning/stocking/organizing/ and/or inventorying in the walk-in freezers and 120 degrees F-plus temperatures on the hot cooking line. “If you can’t take the heat; stay out of the kitchen” is not just a cute saying.
• The work environment for cooks is also usually slippery, often wet. Cooks must wear comfortable, grease-proof, non-slip, steel-toed shoes at all times in the kitchen.
• The kitchen can be very cramped and is always full of very sharp tools and extremely hot equipment. 
• Cooks can expect occasional cuts and burns at work. These are part of the job, and the cook needs to tolerate them with minimal interruption to the workflow.
• Cooks must be able to stand on their feet working for 2 to 3 hours at a time under these conditions without a break during service periods. 
• Cooks can expect to do a great deal of physical heavy lifting daily with regular tasks involving moving 50-lb (plus) containers up and down stairs, along narrow hallways and through the above-described wet/hot/cold/slippery environments.
• The kitchen work zone is a fast-paced, intense, and testosterone-rich environment that can be adversarial. Exposure to "colorful language", "rich metaphors", "sexually charged" statements, and a certain amount of physical and mental stress that is out of place in most work environments is all in a typical day's work for cooks.
• We also expect cooks to be available to work all weekends and holidays as these are the restaurant's busiest times.  Normal work shifts for cooks either begin at 5am or end at midnight (sometimes both).
• While Cooks' shifts will technically include the periodic meal and shift breaks mandated by law, the nature of the business may prevent any time off the line during meal services. A management team member will sign you on- and off- shift if you are too busy to do it yourself.
• We also inform you that cooks and chefs have the highest suicide and divorce rates of any profession except for law enforcement.

I broke down each of the individual positions (breakfast cook, dinner cook, prep cook, etc) in ridiculous detail, highlighting, in meticulous detail, every difficult or unpleasant task they might face.

The GM apparently didn't like my work very much and told me not to use my descriptions for my interviews. Imagine that!  Probably a good thing or I’d never have been able to get anybody but crazed masochists to fill my job openings.

The following year, they handed me a packet of generic F&B job descriptions to use.  They had sent them down from corporate headquarters, where the company lawyers apparently had a large part in writing them. The job descriptions were vanilla, vague and effectively useless as a hiring or training tool (but I guess it kept guys like me from getting the company in trouble).

Conclusion

But times have SO changed! Commercial kitchens are not at all the same places they were nearly 40 years ago. I'm happy to report that the job is NOTHING like this job description which is COMPLETELY outdated and TOTALLY unacceptable in today's sensitive, inclusive, modern restaurant paradigm.  <wink, wink> (psst, Hey buddy, want a sweet line cook job?)