Customers line up outside the Perogy Boyz food truck last summer in this file photo.

More food trucks are likely to roll on to Calgary streets this summer with city council set to review the results of a lengthy pilot project.

The food truck pilot project is drawing to a close after beginning in August 2011, and city officials have drafted a bylaw that would allow more trucks to launch as soon as August of this year.

Keith Pallister, chief license inspector with the city, said council is expected to review a draft bylaw for food trucks on July 29, and if approved, the current cap of 40 trucks would be lifted, potentially creating more competition.

“Calgary seemed to have a lot of interest, a lot of people that really like them,” he said, adding the city has had consistent inquires about launching food trucks.

“I would imagine that the market is going to dictate who’s going to be successful or not.”

James Boettcher, founder of YYC Food Trucks, currently works with 20 of the city’s trucks, and said he sees the potential addition of new trucks as an incentive for existing trucks to create the best products they can.

“I think there’s a lot of people that are actually in a holding pattern in terms of getting in to the industry and they’re actually at a slight advantage because they’ve got to see what business looks like prior to investing in it,” he said.

“The cream will rise to the top; I think the best trucks will succeed.”

Details:

• The proposed by law would still include “no-roll zones” in certain Business Revitalization Zones such as Kensington and 17 Avenue.
• Trucks would also be prevented from parking within 25 metres of a brick-and-mortar restaurant, unless they receive the restaurants consent.
• Pallister said the city is planning to host one more open house before the proposed bylaw comes before council.

http://metronews.ca/news/calgary/670776/food-truck-review-could-bring-more-street-eats-to-calgary/

Merchants can turn their smartphones into registers using the Square credit card reader and having customers sign with their finger. (Square)

Calgary food truck owner Cosmo Spina used to watch potential customers walk away hungry because he couldn’t accept their credit cards and they didn’t have any cash.

“I found that as I got busier and got to more places and more people, a lot of people just don’t carry cash anymore, not even $10,” Spina said in an interview outside the Husky building.

Now, after adopting e-payment technology from one of the many players jockeying for position in this new market, both Spina and the customers who want to use credit cards at his Italian pasta truck are much happier.

Cosmo Spina says about 20 per cent of the customers at his Calgary food truck pay with a credit card, which he can put through a Square reader. (Courtesy Cosmo Spina)

Late last year, Spina signed up for Square, the tiny credit card reader that attaches to a smartphone and was the brainchild of Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey and his vision of making commerce “easy for everyone.”

Square joins other companies like Interac and Rogers, all trying to eke out a position in the highly competitive — but still nascent — mobile payment marketplace.

Interac recently announced the first NFC (near-field communication) debit transaction via a smartphone in Canada, and hopes to roll out the service for consumers later this year.

Rogers says it is expanding its “suretap” service for mobile payment to more smartphones.

“To continue driving adoption and growth of mobile payments in Canada, it is essential that a strong ecosystem is established to include multiple devices, operating systems and payment networks,” Jeppe Dorff, Rogers’ vice-president of transaction services, said in a recent release.

Cosmo Spina runs a credit card through a Square reader attached to his iPhone. (Courtesy Cosmo Spina)

For a small merchant such as Spina, however, just gaining access to the mobile pay world was a huge step.

Spina estimates that one in every five of his customers looking for his gnocchi bolognese or bacon carbonara pays by a credit card run through his iPhone — a marked change from the days when perhaps one in 10 potential customers left empty-handed because he wasn’t accepting plastic.

Spina is the kind of merchant Dorsey and his Square co-founder Jim McKelvey were hoping would sign up after the card reader arrived in Canada — its first stop outside the U.S. — five months ago.

Square isn’t releasing specific data on the uptake in Canada, but Dorsey says “it’s been amazing to watch” how adoption of the reader and its accompanying Square Register app have taken off.

“We had pretty high expectations for growth in the market but they’ve exceeded those expectations.”

Square says it is processing more than $12 billion in payments annually in Canada and the U.S., and that the Canadian uptake is double what it had predicted. The average Canadian transaction size is larger ($120) than in the U.S. ($70), where Square launched in October 2010.

“In the U.S., we saw a very different set of initial merchants. We saw a lot of cafés and coffee stores and much lower transaction size,” says Dorsey.

In Canada, more independent services such as language schools or accountants have adopted Square, which takes a flat fee of 2.75 per cent per transaction.

Square’s adoption also ran into an unexpected factor, but one that plays into so much of Canadian life: the weather.

“It tends to be colder up there,” Dorsey said in an interview from California.

“In the United States, we saw a lot of food trucks and food carts signing up immediately, but when we launched in Canada, we launched in a cold time so we didn’t see a lot of that type of merchant. But we expect that to change as we go into spring and summer, and go into all the festivals that places like Montreal have for instance.”

As much as Square has opened up retail potential for merchants such as Spina, it has limitations — no debit capability, no chip-and-pin technology, no capability on BlackBerry smartphones — which reflect how tricky and fragmented the Canadian mobile payment system is.

Dorsey acknowledges the limitations, but says Square had to start somewhere and isn’t standing pat.

Keep evolving

“The simplest way to start is to start with magnetic strips and the card the majority of the world has, so that’s where we started,” he said.

Various partnerships involving wireless providers, banks and others are emerging to allow mobile payments in Canada. (Canadian Press)

“We think we’ve done a great thing in making commerce easy for people, and easy to start and easy to run and easy to grow your business, but we think we can do a lot more and we continue to evolve and build.”

Interac also wants to evolve and sees its recent announcement as an important step, says Avinash Chidambaram, the company’s director of mobile programs.

A partnership involving McDonald’s Restaurants, RBC Royal Bank, Moneris Solutions and BlackBerry will give some customers the chance to buy smaller-value items such as Big Macs and McMuffins by debit with the wave of a smartphone at an Interac Flash terminal.

“Generally, younger people like to use debit,” says Chidambaram, who notes that 56 per cent of all point-of-sale transactions through Interac’s network are debit.

Unlike Square, Interac’s technology is built around chip-and-pin, something Chidambaram says has been responsible for a reduction in card fraud.

“We’ve been very careful in developing this technology and ensuring we’re leveraging a lot of the security features and capabilities that we’ve already put into our network and our products.”

Still, for any mobile payment system to take off, it has to resonate with someone who wants to use a smartphone for a transaction.

And for that to happen, says Doug Macdonald, a senior manager at consulting firm Deloitte in Toronto, it has to be as easy as using a plastic card, and give a person more benefits.

Make it easy to use

If the new system is “too hard to unlock it,” says Macdonald, “if it doesn’t work, if the battery is dead, then it’s not going to replace your physical wallet.”

For all the action taking place in the mobile payment market, however, widespread adoption and usage of phones for payment is still sometime down the road.

“We’re still very much in the early days,” says Macdonald. “The first generation of NFC wallets that’s coming out right now are very much just replicating what a physical card does, and then linking it into the mobile banking experience of that particular bank.

“The path to one wallet, one application on your phone that holds all of your receipts and keeps track of your spending and helps you make payment from whatever card you want, is still going to be a couple of iterations away.”

Macdonald says there is pent-up demand in Canada for a service such as Square and similar products, such as Moneris’s PAYD.

“I think this trend towards using consumer devices to accept payments has the potential to really shake up both the payments industry and the way that consumers pay.”

What about the cash register?

The fact that Square doesn’t process chip cards is something it will have to solve in the Canadian market, Macdonald says.

In Europe, similar card readers that plug into smartphones have been replaced by a small pin reader that connects to a phone via Bluetooth.

“You’ll start to see more of that,” says Macdonald, adding that there will be more changes in the way consumers pay inside stores, as well, with cash registers potentially fading away.

“You’re increasingly going to be seeing, for instance, sales people carrying tablets and phones with them and making the purchase while they help you shop.”

Still, if you want to pay with cash, that is still going to be an option for the foreseeable future.

“You can still send a telegram if you really want to, too,” says Macdonald.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/story/2013/04/05/f-mobile-payments-smartphones.html

Add a grin to your gin with Porter’s Tonic.
Photograph by: Julie Van Rosendaal , Swerve

When bad weather slows her Cheezy Bizness food truck, Nicole Fewell doesn’t spin her wheels. Instead, she steeps lemon, lime, lemongrass and cinchona bark in distilled water, strains the mixture through cheesecloth and simmers it with agave nectar. The result is a tonic—one with a slightly spicy, complex flavour—that is on the drink menu at Taste, Market and Boxwood. Or pick up your own and, as it says on the bottle, “add a grin to your gin.”

$16/8 oz. bottle. At Vine Arts, 1310 1st St. S.W., 403-290-0700, vinearts.ca, and Silk Road Spice Merchant, 1403 9th Ave. S.E., 403-261-1955, silkroadspices.ca.

porterstonic.com.

http://www.calgaryherald.com/life/Porter+Tonic/8196436/story.html

Photo courtesy of Flickr.

There’s going to be a lot more eats at city hall, as food trucks get their own designated spots nearby.

Two marked parking spots are now reserved for the trucks on 3rd Street Southeast just north of 9th Avenue.

Troy McLeod from the Calgary Parking Authority says there was a lot of demand for space for vendors in the area.

“This location was ideally suited to have food truck activity, daily. So, we’ve initiated a pilot project and we’ll continue the pilot at this location. As well, food trucks have been on-street for a number of months and have been a very good addition to the downtown,” says McLeod.

McLeod tells 660News they’ll be looking for other areas of the city where they can do something similar.

http://www.660news.com/2013/03/19/food-trucks-get-reserved-parking-at-city-hall/

Two permanent parking spots have been designated for food trucks behind the municipal building downtown. (CBC)

The City of Calgary is helping food trucks owners with their search for downtown parking spots by providing two permanent spots behind city hall.

Margaret Hope, owner of the Blamwich truck, says with restrictions of two food trucks per block, and no parking in front of restaurants, it can be difficult to find a spot to park downtown.

“I’ll have a certain corner in my sights, in my head when I leave my kitchen in the morning and when I get there, there’s already two trucks so I will drive somewhere else and there’s already two trucks,” said Hope.

Municipal employee Derek Lockhart is pleased with the decision.

“We lost our cafeteria so it’s great that they’re bringing the food trucks to us.”

The food truck operators will have to pay for their parking spot and Darren Jackson, who operates the Family Fry Guy, hopes trucks will take turns using the designated spots.

“People want the variety and it’s sort of exciting to so to a new truck every couple of days. Even we like to visit different trucks,” said Jackson.

Operators are hoping city hall will consider creating more designated parking spots for food trucks in the future.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/story/2013/03/18/calgary-food-trucks-parking-city-hall.html

Lineup at a mobile eatery in Calgary.
credit : Katie Turner/Metro

A proposed pilot project which would allow food trucks to operate in downtown London is expected to be a hot agenda item when councillors meet for Tuesday’s city council meeting.

Councillors are expected to vote on the pilot’s conditions. They will also choose an appropriate site to hold a public participation meeting to further discusses the issue.

Although the process is still in its preliminary stages, the possibility of permitting food trucks is cooking up considerable debate within the community.

“Council has to be careful not to make it so easy for entrepreneurs to get into the food-truck business, so that they don’t wipe out the bricks-and-mortar businesses,” Palasad restaurants owner Rob Szabo said.

Szabo is concerned food trucks might “cherry pick customer traffic” from nearby restaurants. Additionally, he believes the garbage produced by a mobile restaurant may cause a dirtier city, since trucks sometimes don’t have food-disposal infrastructure in place.

Orest Katolyk, City of London bylaw enforcement manager, insists the report to be presented on Tuesday will recommend food trucks be subjected to standardized health and safety inspections. If approved, they will also be forced to adhere by distance restrictions — a buffer zone separating them from existing restaurants.

Both Szabo and Felipe Comes, the co-owner of Aroma restaurant, would like to see food trucks pay property taxes, too.

“I pay X number of dollars for operating a restaurant, and I want the city to charge the same (to food trucks),” Comes said, with Szabo adding, “Business owners who occupy a bricks-and-mortar-type store end up paying property taxes one way or the other. At the end of the day, that becomes the real core issue.”

Coun. Joni Baechler (Ward 5) says she is open to the food-truck concept as a whole, but would prefer if potential operators offered “innovation ideas around cuisine” as opposed to traditional street meat such as hot dogs and sausages.

When asked about the city having the authority to decline food trucks based on their menu, Katolyk noted, “At this point, I don’t believe we can (regulate) what type of food they serve.”

Overall, Katolyk adds, city staff feels they have done its due diligence and will be able to mimic the best practices in other Canadian cities with a strong food-truck presence.

http://metronews.ca/news/london/582301/downtown-london-food-truck-pilot-project-facing-plenty-of-criticism/

EDMONTON – The High Street Social Club, a theme dining night regularly hosted by the Manor Casual Bistro, is kicking off its 2013 lineup with a 1960s cocktail and dinner party. Winkingly referred to as The R and D Meeting, the event is on Jan. 20, at 6 p.m. at the bistro, 10109 125th St.

Organizer Tarquin Melnyk, the Manor’s bar director and promotions manager, promises live jazz, as well as 1960s-era cocktails such as Old Fashioneds, Manhattans and Gimlets. Manor chef Alex Sneazwell says the food will reflect the trends of the day. (Devilled eggs? Cheese Whiz? Piggies in a blanket?)

The cost is $55 including tax and gratuities, with a full cash bar available. Call 780-482-7577 to purchase tickets.

The High Street Social Club began in mid-2012 and aims to make dining more of a social event than merely an experience for couples or small groups. Held on Sunday nights, it tends to be a favourite among people who work in the restaurant sector, because that’s often the only day their restaurants are closed. But all are welcome, and it’s fun for non-restaurant folk to rub up against the people who make it happen on the food scene.

“It’s about making the food community smaller and more accessible for everybody,” says Melnyk.

You can follow the High Street Social Club on Twitter @HSSCyeg.

- Doreen Prei, the chef de cuisine at Zinc, is moving on. The German-born Prei, a fresh and inventive force at Zinc since it opened three years ago in the Art Gallery of Alberta, will be turning her knife skills to good use at the Edmonton Petroleum Club. This is sad news for Zinc diners, but good news for the private members at the Petroleum Club. I predict a major steak sandwich shakeup.

- Nomad food truck, a fixture on Rice Howard Way over the summer, is moving inside. Nomad chef and NAIT grad Mike Scorgie has leased space in the McLeod building downtown and hopes to open by the summer. Watch this space for details as they emerge. Also, the Century Hospitality Group is opening a new shop, The Parlour Italian Kitchen and Bar, expected to start slinging pizza by the spring. nomadkitchen.ca

- Michael Kalmanovitch of Earth’s General Store (9605 82nd Ave.) is sponsoring a session on working with fermented foods, which are good for the body, the planet and the tastebuds, on Monday, Jan. 14 from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. It will feature a conversation, and a demonstration, about fermented flavours from kefir to sauerkraut. The workshop costs $25 and you have to purchase your spot online, in advance, via Event Brite. Call Earth’s General Store for details at 780-439-8725. egs.ca

- If you’re suffering from January remorse, Dietitians of Canada can help. The group has developed a program called Eatracker that will help you become a new person by noon tomorrow. Actually, achieving a total transformation is probably not strictly necessary; a sensible diet and exercise program is more realistic, and less stressful.

Eatracker helps with meal-planning, food analysis and exercise tips, plus offers recipes complete with nutrition information. eatracker

- CapitalCare Dickinsfield is having a fundraiser to help refurbish 11 dining rooms at the facility. The fundraiser, geared around a Ukrainian theme, is being held Jan. 30, with cocktails at 6 p.m. and dinner at 6:30. CapitalCare Dickinsfield is at 14225 94th St. Tickets are $45 each for a multi-course Ukrainian extravaganza featuring everything from perogy to poppyseed cake. A Ukrainian band will help you dance the calories away. Call 780-448-2413 for details and to get tickets.

- Fork Fest arrives in Edmonton for its semi-annual festival of eating well at bargain prices. This year, the event happens from Jan. 20 to Jan. 24, and then again from Jan. 27 to 31. Keep your eyes on the Live Local website for details on which independent restaurants are taking part, but rumour has it this will be the largest Fork Fest event ever.

http://www.edmontonjournal.com/life/food/Edmonton+Food+Notes+fashioned+flavour+foodie+night+town/7791314/story.html

Calgary’s food trucks have been selling street eats for over a year and like any food establishment are subjected to regular health inspections.

Over the past fourteen months food inspectors found critical food safety issues in 26 of the 44 food trucks on the road in Calgary.

The issues range from unprotected light bulbs to refrigerators that are not at the proper temperature.

The problems are serious but all the issues have been corrected once they were pointed out by inspectors.

The trucks are inspected without advance notice and so far no truck has ever failed an inspection and been shut down.

“I feel more safe eating from a food truck than a lot of the restaurants I go to,” said James Boettcher of yycfoodtrucks.

The Noodle Bus has been checked three times and on each occasion a single error was found and fixed immediately.

Staff in the truck says food safety is their top priority.

“Anytime they can come up and check because we are clean. We really do keep all the food the proper hygiene and everything. We’re not afraid of any time the inspector will come up. We have nothing to be worried right?” said Rona Bacar.

On Wednesday customers were lined up for a hot bowl of soup and say they aren’t worried.

“You can go to the Alberta health website and look at things and people get citations all the time and most of them are really minor and if you don’t understand it you’ll just see citations and be really worried when really there isn’t too much to worry about” said customer, Amanda Hudson.

Alberta Health says the inspections show the system is working and that food truck grub is as safe as any other restaurant.

For more information on restaurant inspections, visit the Alberta Health Services website.

http://calgary.ctvnews.ca/food-trucks-face-tough-tests-1.1019430

Food inspections by Alberta Health Services show that most food trucks that have been operating in Calgary in the past year have recorded violations.

The report found 75 per cent of the food truckfleet had at least one critical health violation.

Some of those violations include freezers that weren’t cold enough, lack of hand sanitizer and gasoline being stored near food.

Health inspectors found whole limes stored in an old raw meat box in the Los Comprades truck.

Owner Raul Serrano says he planned on throwing them out.

“I don’t want someone to get like a stomach ache because of a stupid thing … in my truck. I am always doing my best thing to keep it clean,” Serrano said.

Some other food truck owners like Aman Adatia, who runs the Naaco Truck and is part of YYC Food Trucks, say their businesses meet the same standards as other restaurants.

No worse than restaurants, says one truck owner

His food truck has had no health violations.

“All these violations that we quote-on-quote have are usually corrected immediately and if they are not … you are shut down,” Adatia says.

He also says conditions in food trucks are not worse than any local restaurant.

“If I notice that my refrigeration temperature is off and AHS were to walk in and I was still serving food even though I knew of the problem, I cannot sleep at night by getting somebody sick,” Adatia said.

“So every food truck owner, every restaurant owner, whether they be brick and mortar or on wheels, is accountable for what it is they do.”

AHS says nobody has reported being ill from eating at a food truck and no food truck has been shut down because of health violations, but the health agency still says customers should be cautious at any restaurant.

For a full list of restaurant health violations click here.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/story/2012/10/31/calgary-food-truck-safety.html

A recent check of the Alberta Health Services website has found many of those who run those restaurants on wheels have received failing grades during health inspections.

The Calgary Sun reports about three quarters of the 35 fully-sanctioned food trucks have been written up, in some cases for what’s called critical violations.

Most of the problems deal with the storage and handling of food products, specifically temperature control.  If not properly maintained can allow bacteria to grow, which can cause food poisoning.

Some operators have also been cited for not having enough water on-hand, which is crucial for cleaning.

The man who founded YYCFoodTrucks, James Boettcher, says the industry welcomes the feedback from food inspectors.  He says as soon as problems have been identified they’ve been corrected, producing not only a better product but improved public safety.

Food trucks have been up-and-running in the city for the past 14 months.

To take a look at the most recent health inspection of your favourite restaurant on wheels, click here.

http://www.660news.com/radio/660news/article/417369–health-inspectors-tell-calgary-food-truck-operators-to-clean-up-their-act