If you find yourself in need of something a little different to take the edge off between classes, Camosun’s Culinary Arts students might have just what you’re looking for. The college is launching a food truck in June that will include, among other things, tacos, poke, and ramen. Camosun Culinary Arts chair Steve Walker-Duncan says the food will be unique, made with an international feel to encompass the many different cultures at Camosun. He adds that the project involves many different programs at the college, such as Plumbing, Marketing, and Sheet Metal.
“Sheet Metal have helped us with the conversion inside for the extractor fluid and some of the work spaces,” says Walker-Duncan. “Electrical have redone all our lights; we’ve been replaced with LED lights.”
Students in the Comics and Graphic Novels program created a design for the exterior of the truck, says Walker-Duncan.
“There’s going to be a very visual eye-catching wrap around the exterior of the truck that, again, demonstrates what Camosun is doing, because it’s going to be basically students from different departments,” he says.
Food trucks are a growing sector in the industry today, says Walker-Duncan, partly because real estate is skyrocketing.
“Specifically Victoria and Vancouver and any of the cosmopolitan areas, you know, real estate is so expensive; it’s definitely doable for people to get into a food truck as opposed to the hundreds of thousands of dollars necessary to set up a regular restaurant,” he says. “They can do different things in different places at different times.”
Food trucks can do everything most restaurants can, says Walker-Duncan, adding that the new food truck will be at various local events as well as on campus.
“They’re going to be out there supporting community events,” he says. “This is a learning platform not just [for] culinary students, but all the other departments who have been involved with it.”
Walker-Duncan says that the college will be strategizing where the food truck goes, and that they aren’t trying to take away business from any commercial food trucks.
“We’re talking about special events moreso than going and parking it down behind BC Museum, for example,” he says. “These are very select events we are either invited to, or we’re going to be the only one there, or it’s a big enough event that it’s not likely to impact a commercial operator.”
First-year Culinary Arts student Lexie Shaffer is one of the students who may be serving food from the food truck. She grew up making food—from getting her own Easy-Bake Oven as a youngster to working on a Thrifty Foods food truck—and she’s always loved cooking.
“I just figured, ‘Why not make a career out of it if I love it so much?’” she says.
Shaffer says speed is key to working on a food truck, due to the small spaces that the chefs are working in.
“The people who work on the food trucks—obviously they have to work on their speed,” she says. “You have to be quick and be able to pay attention to orders and be organized.”
The food truck menus will change about once a week; as for where the trucks will be and when, Walker-Duncan says the schedule has not been finalized, but they are looking at one day a week at Lansdowne and three or four days a week at Interurban, where they are scouting out some different locations, including one near the Pacific Institute for Sport Excellence.
“They’re doing recipe testing right now,” says Walker-Duncan about the students involved with the truck, “and hopefully different menu items than people have been used to, just so that there’s that newness.”