Hacker News Reader

Comment by oxymoran | Hacker News Reader

The food truck laws in Michigan in general are pretty annoying. You need to have a commissary kitchen where all the food is actually made in order to be in compliance. Which defeats one of the main points of having a food truck to begin with(not having to rent or own an expensive building)

View on HN

New York (City) as well, IIRC. Street-side cooking is more akin to heating up already prepared food. San Francisco, too. While it seemingly defeats the purpose, the flip side of the argument is that it is easier to ensure base levels of hygiene.

The article itself, btw, is a pretty nifty use of PostGIS viz.

Edit: Originally had all of California included but it was pointed out that my knowledge was limited to San Francisco as LA does not have the same requirements.

In Los Angeles, food trucks must be parked at a commissary, but it isn’t required that food prep be done there.

Ah, I might have been too over-reaching. I know it's certainly true in San Francisco.

I’m not so certain. I know of prominently-positioned pizza trucks in SF that are clearly cooking their pizzas there. I doubt they are doing that illegally.

A lot of the laws differentiate between foods that are dangerous when left out (eg meat) and those that aren’t (pizza supplies). I think it’s called cottage food laws?

"All mobile food vendors must operate in conjunction with a food facility, also known as a commissary, such as a licensed commercial kitchen. Thus, you will need to rent a commercial space for preparing food, and storing your inventory."

https://businessportal.sfgov.org/start/starter-kits/food-tru...

Another commenter mentioned that there may be various classifications of food such that a Pizza truck may be able to get around it due to the nature of the ingredients but I'm unfamiliar as to where those lines are drawn

Yup. Food trucks in my area (LA County, but not Los Angeles itself) definitely cook in their trucks, but they effectively cluster into what I call "food truck cafeterias", side streets that seem to be set aside for food truck usage.

It's actually pretty convenient, since two streets over from my office there's usually a dozen or so trucks all available on a low-traffic street.

But the other main point of having a food truck is to avoid all sorts of regulations on food safety, hygiene, waste disposal, etc. (which is why they are also known as "roach coaches"). So yes, those ordinances do largely defeat the purpose of food trucks.

If you assume that all food trucks are violating the law anyway, how exactly are more restrictive laws supposed to help?

I'm on the side of the food trucks, but this is an easy question. It replaces the need to enforce food safety regulations, which is hard, with the ability to enforce simple bans on the trucks' existence/presence, which is easy.

If you know food trucks are doing terrible things, but you can't prove they're doing anything wrong, you can solve your problem by dropping the evidence requirement.

And here I thought the main point of having a food truck is to sell essentially the same stuff regular restaurants do, but with extra markup for the hipster factor.

Food can and is cooked at the cart or truck. Though there may be a regulation regarding prep, no idea. I used to visit a burger truck every Friday off Water St in down town, Frites n Meats. They cooked the burgers and fries on the spot. Every other food truck I've patronized also cooked and served fresh food.

The carts simply have no prep space so they prep the food at a kitchen. I frequent one halal cart here in Queens, Shah's, and have many times witnessed the delivery van pull up and drop off food. I've also seen them cut open a vacuum sealed bag of raw marinated meat, pour it over the grill and start cooking. Delicious.

Not sure about Michigan, but Florida has commissary co-working type spaces. Show up with your ingredients, cook, clean-up, peace out. Most of the co-working type commissarys are pay as you go (hourly) type deals. It's common amongst Farmer Market vendors.

We have commissary co-working spaces in Georgia too, but they were pretty expensive last time I checked. I think the law here requires that you have a dedicated space that isn't shared.

> You need to have a commissary kitchen where all the food is actually made in order to be in compliance

Do you have a source for this so I can clarify my understanding? I thought that Chicago was somewhat infamous until recently for being the only major city in the US that didn't allow food trucks to cook on board.

Note that requiring that a truck have a commissary is not the same as mandating that all cooking happen there. The common requirement to have a commissary is so inspectors know where to find trucks, presumably.

Nobody is going to let you cook in a food truck where permits are required. There's just no way to do that safely with a random truck.

Even fast food franchises do all their salads centrally to avoid the Chipotle scare that happened a couple years ago.

This is also the case in Boulder, CO. In addition to that, each truck is required to install a fire suppression system that start around $3,000.

Gotta love when regulations are why we can't have nice things.

This reads like a complaint about vaccines because nobody has seen Polio in like a lifetime...

Just as a reminder: Up until the early 20th century, any large city that wasn't home to a Molasses-based catastrophe had at some point burned more or less completely down, usually killing thousands: Chicago, SF, London are well known.

Not sure if you were alluding to this with your comment but people DO complain about vaccines because they haven't seen the widespread ill effects of their not existing

It's highly probable that the commenter to which you have responded chose their wording precisely because of how correct your point is.

If by "nice things" you mean salmonella and grease fires, then sure.

Not to defend Boulder, specifically, but when thinking about regulations it's really easy to tally up "all" of the costs and benefits without crediting them for the nonexistent costs of the bad things that didn't happen.

It’s just as easy easy to justify regulation by adding up all the imaginary costs that will be avoided.

Kitchen Fires and food poisoning are not imaginary.

How exactly does preparing food in the truck lead to food poisoning? Why doesn't your backyard grill need a fire suppression system?

1) If cooked food comes in contact with a surface that raw meat was prepped on, the cooked food can become tainted.

2) Most cities fire code say that your backyard grill is required to be a certain distance from the building structure (my local ordinance says 15ft), it just so happens that most people ignore the local ordinances. Those codes are b/c of grill fires.

Large portions of the world don't have these regulations and seems to be doing just fine. Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Singapore to name a few are full of food stands preparing food at the stand.

Funny you should mention Singapore, as the government moved all of the street hawkers to "hawker complexes" and there is a lot of regulation around food hygiene[1].

[1]: http://eresources.nlb.gov.sg/infopedia/articles/SIP_1637_201...

So, it's still easier to sell street food there than in Michigan?

So instead of having each food truck pay for a monthly health inspection fee and having random health inspections every X time ( so that the cost of the health inspections is completely paid for by the food trucks), we simply outlaw them.

I'm not against regulation, I'm against broad, overbearing, and dumb regulation.

Asking for fire suppression systems in what is essentially a commercial kitchen on wheels is not unreasonable. Grease fires are really bad.

A quick search reveals https://www-static.bouldercolorado.gov/docs/Mobile_Food_Vehi...

> a restaurant fire suppression system shall be required for all cooking operations that produce grease-laden vapors. These systems can be activated automatically or manually to dispense chemicals to suppress the flames of a fire

I.e. it's not "each truck". You can have a food truck that doesn't create that particular fire hazard without an expensive fire suppression system.

California also requires a commissary kitchen.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com