Students excited about food truck stop

FAYETTEVILLE -- It was an unusual sight as Holt Middle School students lined up to get their lunch at a food truck parked in front of their school.

The Fayetteville Public Schools' food truck was making the first stop in its tour this month of the district's middle, junior high and high schools.

Students got to build their own "Bulldog Burger" with toppings for beef sliders handed out by food-service workers in the truck. They also received potato salad and baked beans.

Any student may order lunch from the food truck on the day it's scheduled to be at his school. Staff members inside the truck provided about 140 meals in 15 minutes during Holt's first lunch period Wednesday.

Elana McClelland, 10, said her food was cold by the time she collected it and brought it back inside to eat. Still, she described it as "delicious" and "amazing." She said she'd try it again if offered the chance.

"All food trucks are good," Elana said.

Principal Matt Morningstar said he liked the concept, and the kids were excited about it. Getting to go outside and get food from the truck makes them feel a little more grown up, he said.

The market research firm IBISWorld counted 4,046 food trucks in the United States last year, nearly twice the number counted in 2008. Annual revenue totaled nearly $1 billion last year. Annual revenue growth was 7.3 percent from 2012 to 2017, but is expected to slow to about 3 percent until 2022, according to the firm.

The popularity of food trucks has become noticeable on school campuses, too. Bentonville High School, for example, has a food truck day about once per semester. About a dozen vendors showed up on campus Sept. 25.

The Van Buren School District bought a food truck earlier this year. The district will use it for its summer meals program and during the school year to provide fun options such as grilled hamburgers to students in the upper grades, according to a post on the district's website.

Northwest Arkansas Community College's Brightwater: A Center for the Study of Food also has its own truck. The college worked with Apex Specialty Vehicles, a Missouri company, to design a food truck that could serve as an education tool on how to operate a food truck business and as a training tool for nutritional courses, according to a post on Apex's website.

The Fayetteville district rolled out its Bulldog-themed, retro-fitted cargo trailer in June to enhance its summer food program. The truck parked outside the public library. The truck and two other sites combined to serve nearly 18,000 meals this summer, an increase of 25 percent from the year before, according to Ally Mrachek, the district's director of child nutrition.

"Now we're just using it for fun," Mrachek said about what the district is calling its Food Truck Dayz lunch series. "It also helps to promote my program. It shows kids school meals are cool, they can be fun and delicious. They can be similar to what they might see out in the community."

She plans to do the lunch series again in the spring, probably with a different menu. This month's menu was planned with the idea of serving something that wasn't too messy or wouldn't take long to serve, she said.

Mrachek said the district's meals are fresh, colorful and very different from the school meals students' parents might have eaten when they were young. The district tries to mirror food trends popular in the restaurant industry, she said.

"Nationwide, school food is changing," Mrachek said. "It's not the brown food on a Styrofoam plate you used to see. So we're kind of joining that mission to make food look different and really fun."

The district spent $41,409 on the food truck.

NW News on 10/15/2018