The whirs and hisses of drills and welding torches carry outside a warehouse tucked away in a Fort Lauderdale office park. Inside, rows of step vans and delivery trucks are being reborn as food trucks.

As mobile eateries have flourished in South Florida in recent years, food truck builders have also shifted into high gear.

These mobile food truck factories — including Concession Nation in Fort Lauderdale, AAA Concession Trucks and Trailers in Davie, and FoodCart USA in Miami — scour the state for new and late-model Chevy, Ford and GMC step vans as well as used flower, fire and delivery trucks (and in one case, a shuttle van from NASA). They add fryers, refrigerators and stainless steel surfaces and turn them into rolling restaurants.

“Everybody wants one,” said Alexander Alvarez, owner of Concession Nation, which completed 126 jobs in 2012, a 34 percent increase from 2011.

The weakened economy and high unemployment of the past few years have helped drive the local food truck boom. As people were laid off or considering job changes, some decided to become their own boss and invest in mobile units. Meanwhile, TV programs such as Food Network’s “The Great Food Truck Race” and the Cooking Channel’s “Eat Street” were showing contestants making thousands of dollars a day with a customized food truck.

Yes, food truck operators have costs such as gas, food inventory and permits. But these are “less expensive than brick-and-mortar facilities, making it easier to enter the food service business,” said Ron Grimes, manager of environmental health programs at NSF International, a nonprofit that develops standards for equipment used in food service establishments such as food trucks.

“People don’t have to pay rent [with a food truck], and they are not committed to one place,” said Bruce Hicks, owner of AAA Concession Trucks and Trailers, adding that his business doubled to 30 trucks in 2012 from the previous year, from a mix of local and national clients.

He began to shift his business toward food truck building in the past two years after noticing a decline in RV-related jobs.

“I saw that [business] going away. People were in foreclosures and losing their homes,” Hicks said.

These days, he’s getting requests to create food trucks for freestanding businesses such as Popeye’s fast-food chicken and Donna’s Restaurant and Lounge, which has locations throughout Broward County.

He was also hired to outfit an all-white, 8-foot GMC step van for Gozen Yogurt, a self-service frozen yogurt company based in Philadelphia. It will be painted in orange, yellow and blue swirls and have a flat-screen TV, freezer and four self-serve yogurt machines. Once completed later this month, the truck will be ready to dispense sorbet, dulce de leche and caramel-flavored treats at corporate parties and festivals from Jupiter to Miami.

“The real advantage to having a food truck is that you will be able bring the entire frozen yogurt store experience to someone’s home,” said Adam Zell, the Florida partner for Gozen Yogurt.

Of course, none of this would be possible without the ever-growing popularity of food truck fare and events. The National Restaurant Association doesn’t track the number of food trucks in the United States, but the group has found that consumers have been increasingly flocking to mobile eateries.

In a 2012 association survey, 43 percent of adults said they had bought items from a food truck.

The demand for food trucks, Concession Nation’s Alvarez said, comes from a base of customers hungry for “fast-food but better quality. You get a homemade plate served to you in 10 minutes.”

At Concession Nation’s offices and warehouse in Fort Lauderdale, calls pour in from throughout the country. The San Francisco 49ers football team, for example, had the company create a team-themed concession trailer.

And the Fontainebleau in Miami Beach recently hired Concession Nation to build an 18-foot food truck to sell some of the dishes found at the resorts’ restaurants such as Gotham Steak and Scarpetta. The truck will roam the property, complete with three flatscreen monitors showing video of the hotel’s amenities.

“It’s a truck that we are going to use to feature lots of different venues in the resort,” said Thomas Connell, the resort’s executive chef. “We are going to use it for special events, barbecues, LIV [nightclub] after-hours … wherever our customers need it really.”

Costs range per builder, but a used food truck can cost $3,000 to $20,000, depending on the mileage, year, condition and size, which can be 16 or 18 feet long. Fully-loaded new trucks can run as much as $100,000. Generally, vendors find the trucks for the client, but a customer can bring a truck to a contractor and have it outfitted with equipment.

Workers strip the rear (or the box) of the truck, install aluminum walls and diamond-plated flooring. They add stainless-steel counters, refrigerators, sinks and deep fryers, or whatever the client requests. Some owners add LED lights on their roofs and flat screens to promote their menus to potential passers-by.

Concession Nation, which features its work on fastfoodtruck.com, also wraps the exterior of the vehicle to brand the food and services.

“You have a brand-new truck inside and, plus, you have free advertising whenever you hit the road,” said Monica Gonzalez, chief financial officer at Concession Nation. A typical job there lasts about five days.

Craig Larson, owner of Lucille’s Bad to the Bone BBQ in Boca Raton and Boynton Beach, wanted a food truck as a side catering business to bring his culinary fare to office workers daily.

“We realized there was as significant truck scene going on down in [Miami-Dade] but didn’t see a lot of it in Palm Beach,” he said.

So last year he sought the services of Concession Nation, which transformed a 2001 GMC 28-foot-long step van used for flower deliveries in Disney World into Lucille’s on Wheels, a black food truck bedecked with the image of a smiling red-headed woman carrying a tray of food.

“We wanted to do something whimsical, slightly southern, slightly risque. The whole deal with the truck was to have fun,” said Larson, whose mobile unit houses a three-compartment sink, two fryers and a 4-foot grill that makes barbecue chicken nachos and fries slicked in gravy. “It’s a whole rebirth for that truck from what it did originally.”

http://www.southflorida.com/news/fl-food-truck-builders-20130306,0,3231810.story

MILAN — Any vending machine can spit out a caffeinated beverage and a bag of chips. Nothing compares, however, to the smorgasbord of options offered with a smile by Hasty Tasty’s Mindee DeSmet.

Ms. DeSmet is one of seven catering truck drivers for Hasty Tasty Food Service. The drivers, all women, make the rounds daily to Quad-Cities work sites to ensure factory workers, car mechanics and other blue-collar workers get the breakfast, lunch, snack or beverage they crave.

A couple thousand workers flock out of their work places to the beckoning truck every week, according to company owner Galen Starkweather.

Judging by their reactions, customers are just as crazy about the best sellers of biscuits and gravy or steak and cheese sandwiches as they are for Ms. DeSmet’s conversation.The Moline woman has been driving the Hasty Tasty truck for just shy of 32 years.

Ms. DeSmet is one of the company’s longest-serving employees, and she still enjoys the daily grind that takes her on a whirlwind tour of 32 Milan businesses from 8 a.m. to 12:15 p.m. Monday through Friday.

“It was really fun in my teens. It’s still fun,” she said. “I’ve made lots of friends.”

Customers are the best part of the job.

“I mostly just visit friends every day. I know something about everybody, and they know something about me,” she said. “It’s been a good living and great hours.”

Ms. DeSmet is done for the day by early afternoon. Her day starts out by stocking the truck with hot and cold food items and then heading out on the route. At the end of the day, she refills the truck with beverages, chips and other items to be ready for the next day.

On a recent Monday, Ms. DeSmet was giving change and handing out plastic forks in the parking lot of businesses while catching up with her customers on weekend happenings.Among her customers was Ed Edwards, a warehouse worker of Group O, who said he’s been buying from Ms. DeSmet for two years.

When asked what keeps bringing him back, Ms. DeSmet shouts out, “It’s me and my smiling face.”

Mr. Edwards chuckles and agrees immediately, saying, “That’s true.”

Kenny Franks, a service technician at Eriksen Chevrolet, Milan, has been buying from Ms. DeSmet for about 18 years.

“She’s a good gal, she really is,” he said. “She’s pleasant and takes care of you.”

Eriksen Chevrolet is one of the few indoor stops Ms. DeSmet makes. Every day just after 10 a.m. she pulls her truck into the service department, hops out of the white Ford cab and flips open the doors at the rear and side of the truck to reveal her offerings. The truck is refrigerated, with propane ovens in the rear.

Hot items range from French toast sandwiches complete with sausage and egg, to chicken strips, pizzas, burritos and hot sandwiches. The side of the truck displays a wide variety of beverages, many kinds of chips and snacks, as well as salads and other cold items.

In less than 10 minutes, Ms. DeSmet has handed out the grub, swapped cash for change and chatted up her regulars. Then she hops back into the still-running truck to make her next stop, U-Pull-A-Part. While there, Ms. DeSmet helps a few customers and then readies to head back on the road. Before she can hop back in the truck, a woman runs out of the office and yells, “No, wait. I’m hungry!”

This is a common sight. “My doors are closed and they are saying, ‘Wait, wait!’ ” she said.

Ever cheerful, Ms. DeSmet helps the woman pick out chicken strips and offers her dressing before getting back in the truck.

Winter is a slower time. Workers are less inclined to bundle up and check out the offerings than they are in summer. Even so, Ms. DeSmet’s arrival draws out the usual buyers with little convincing.

In addition to colder temperatures, company downsizing also puts a damper on business. Mr. Starkweather used to run 10 routes, and trucks used to serve second-shift workers, but there just isn’t enough demand to continue offering those services at this time. A tighter economy also has led to less spending money, and some are opting to pack lunches instead, he said.

Despite those negatives, the catering truck business he started in 1977 still is going strong. He said a key part of the business is the quality employees who serve customers no matter the circumstance.

“Whether it’s 10 below or 100 degrees out, they have to go out there because our customers are out there,” he said. “The only time our trucks don’t go out is if it’s freezing rain or a blizzard, something they can’t get through.

“If customers can get to work, we’ve got to be out there to feed them.”

Mr. Starkweather called Ms. DeSmet a “wonderful girl” who is a part of his dedicated staff. Many of his employees have stuck with the company for many years (his food service manager, Scott Miller, has been with him for 28 years) and have built close ties to the customers they serve.

“They get to go to the weddings of the children; a lot of that goes on,” he said. “We feed them lunch every day. Every day our girls are out there on the trucks. We get them (customers) out of the machine shop, the garage, get them out of the building for a few minutes.”

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