The Rise of the Mobile Business
The food truck industry has a pretty interesting history. It all goes back to 1691 in New Amsterdam, which is now known as New York City. At that time the city first began regulating street vendors for selling food from push carts. In 1866, Charles Goodnight invented the chuck wagon, which was one of the first completely portable kitchens on wheels. Then in 1936, the Oscar Meyer Weiner mobile cart started rolling out their first portable hotdog cart. So that started the famous (or infamous) New York City hotdog carts that you can find all over the city. The 1950s saw the advent of the ice cream truck and the food carts that would show up in newly built subdivisions and outside of construction sites. In 1974, a Mexican immigrant named Raul Martinez converted an old ice cream truck into the nation's first taco truck, which he parked outside of an East Los Angeles bar. These early food trucks and carts weren’t your modern “foodie” fare. Most of them were simple, grab-and-go blue collar...