Food truck

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A food truck, mobile kitchen is a mobile venue that sells food. Some, including ice cream trucks, sell mostly frozen or prepackaged food; others are more like restaurants-on-wheels. Some may cater to specific meals, such as the breakfast truck, lunch truck or lunch wagon, and snack truck or break truck.

Food trucks cater events (carnivals, construction sites, sporting events etc.) where potential customers gather, and places of regular work or study (college campuses, office complexes, industrial parks, auto repair shops, movie sets, military bases, etc.) where potential customers require regular meals or snacks. Some can boast loyal followings.

In the United Kingdom, these are known as snack vans and can be found on nearly all major trunk roads at the side of the road selling their food. A 1/4lb burger can be purchased for about £2 (approx. $3.5USD). Many people prefer to stop at one of these Burger vans when travelling due to the cheap price, rather than stop at a motorway service station where prices can be extremely high. In anglophone Canada, they are known as Coffee trucks. In the US, they may whimsically be called 'roach coaches'.

An early version of the food truck was military field kitchen - for example the US Army's mobile canteen [1]; another predecessor in the United States was the old West's chuckwagon.

[edit] Ethnic food trucks

Taco trucks are mobile kitchens that primarily serve Mexican food. They are characteristic of cities in the United States with large Latino populations, mainly the southwest and especially California. Central California (mainly the 209 area code), has a large taco truck population. In this area, the trucks have a huge fan base and are visited by large numbers of people each day. There are large numbers of the trucks in Salida, Turlock, Modesto, Atwater, Stockton, Lodi, Winton, Newman, Stevinson, Merced and Los Banos California. They can be found, most often, in the inner city, parked in private parking lots or on public streets in commercial areas. Taco trucks have been mentioned in the Zagat Survey and the Los Angeles Times.

On some college campuses, particularly in the northeastern United States, Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai, Indian, and a variety of other ethnic foods are available from food trucks.