Food truck operators feel regulatory pinch

This year, Amritpal Sarai downsized from 18 wheels to four when he started a new venture with his family in the food truck business.

His wife and three children were ready for him to stay home after an 18-year career driving coast-to-coast in a semitruck. So the Sarai family got together and started Naan-Stop, an Indian food truck serving a large menu of dishes in the parking lot of Trinity Church East Fishers Campus at 11721 Olio Road.

“We were just like, it’s time for you to be home,” Aashvir Sarai said about his father. “And so we switched something up, and we started a family business.”

With that decision, the Sarai family joined a growing number of entrepreneurs in the local food truck industry who must weave through Indiana’s byzantine system of permitting. All 92 counties in Indiana have their own fee structures and procedures for licensing, and some municipalities charge permitting fees, as well.

In Hamilton County, the Sarais paid $100 for a county permit. And to work in Fishers, they paid $200 for a city permit. If they want to go to Marion County, the charge would be $173. And should they ever take their truck to Noblesville, the fee would be the state’s largest: $1,000.

Now, the city of Westfield is considering implementing a fee, as well.

In 2013, Fishers became the first Hamilton County community to pass an ordinance specifically regulating fleets of mobile businesses. Two years later, Noblesville’s City Council approved an ordinance that included the $1,000 licensing fee on food trucks.

In central Indiana, county permitting fees range from $75 (Madison County) to $200 (Johnson County). Some cities and towns, such as Carmel and Zionsville, do not charge an additional permitting fee, but many others do.

AJ Feeney-Ruiz, who operates the Books Bourbon & Bacon food truck, said he has largely abandoned the suburbs and will stick to Marion County where he feels comfortable with the application and inspection process.

“As a food truck, if we want to do business in Hamilton County, we have to be separately permitted, not just in Hamilton County, but in Fishers and in Westfield and in Noblesville,” he said. “That’s garbage.”

Feeney-Ruiz worked as a chef in Paris before he returned to Indianapolis on March 1, 2020, where he hoped to take his cooking skills to the city’s restaurant scene. Two weeks later, restaurants began shutting down due to the pandemic, and he started frying doughnuts and baking bread at home to sell, which led to the food truck.

“It was not my dream, but I just wanted to make food and feed people,” he said. “I have not made any money from this. I’ve lost a lot. I’m pretty much in debt after this year, but my goal is to get my food out there to people and to create fun little culinary adventures for people.”

Feeney-Ruiz has been vocal in his opposition to having to pay a fee to every county and to some municipalities. He has expressed his concerns in testimony at the Statehouse and in television news interviews.

“It’s so funny that Indiana is supposed to be a great state to do business in, but this one particular industry is one of the most backward in the country,” he said. “I think people just turned a blind eye to it until last year” when legislators studied the procedures that counties use for food trucks.

He hopes for a streamlined system in which a food truck operator could use a website run by the state, pay a single fee electronically and file a permit that would go to every county health department, similar to the way the food truck system works in Florida. Some Indiana counties, he said, are “stuck in the 1980s” and require paper recording of sales taxes and cashier’s checks and do not accept electronic payments.

Feeney-Ruiz also argued that a statewide, shared database of mobile food applications and required documentation would better serve smaller counties that might not have a dedicated employee who handles mobile kitchens.

“It doesn’t make sense that we have to pay sometimes $5,000 per year in permitting just to operate regularly within doughnut counties and some other surrounding counties,” Finney-Ruiz said. “I think it’s just insane, and that’s including municipalities.”

Looking for a solution

Nationally, there are more than 35,000 food trucks with more than 50,000 people employed in the industry, according to multiple reports. The industry was valued at $1.16 billion in 2021 and is expected to grow by 6.4% annually through 2030, according to a report by Grand View Research.

Rep. Joanna King, R-Elkhart, has baked pretzels at her business, JoJo’s Pretzels, since 1989. For about 10 years, she operated a food truck that she took to the Elkhart County 4-H Fair.

She said it was one of her competitors, Brian Krider, who co-owns Ben’s Soft Pretzels and has a fleet of food trucks throughout the state, who came to her and advocated for a bill to streamline the process for food truck operators across counties.

House Bill 1258, signed this year by Gov. Eric Holcomb, will cap licensing fees for counties at $200 and require county health departments to create mobile food retail permits that follow a set of universal standards by next year. The new law does not address cities and towns and their ability to charge permitting fees of any amount they choose.

“Our food truck guys were saying, ‘This is really hard to keep everything straight. Can we do this through a more streamlined system?’” King said.

Sarai said a streamlined licensing system will be helpful for mobile food operators who work in multiple counties.

“Not only for me, but everybody else that’s a food truck vendor around an area,” he said.

King plans to sponsor another bill next year that would create a statewide portal where food truck operators could get a single license and operate in other counties, like a driver’s license. Information would be held in a database available to counties, drivers and the Indiana Department of Health.

“During the time of pandemic, all these food truck operators were trying to figure out how to navigate a system that really, for a long time, was not really a part of Indiana food culture,” King said. “But we know today how important food trucks are for our festivals and events.”

Krider, who also does business in Michigan with Ben’s Soft Pretzels, said Indiana’s northern neighbor allows food truck operators to pay one permitting fee and move around the state.

“If Indiana wants to continue its track record and become more business-friendly, these are things that they’re going to have to look at,” he said.

Ashley Davidson operates The Legendary Kitchen Food Truck primarily in Franklin and occasionally in Indianapolis, with her husband, Ted. They started the food truck in 2017 thinking they would only use it at The Legends Golf Club where they handle catering services.

She said she worries that setting a cap on licensing permit fees will cause counties that charge less than $200 to raise costs.

“I’m not sure that that’s going to be a benefit, and I’m still going to be expected to have a license in all of those counties and to be inspected,” Davidson said. “If anything, that’s the one thing that I think people also may not realize.”

Setting standards

In Westfield, leaders are planning an ordinance that will change the way the city handles food truck permit requests.

In 2014, the Westfield City Council approved an ordinance limiting food truck activity to events. Three years later, the council expanded the ordinance and began approving exceptions individually.

City Council member Victor McCarty sponsored the new ordinance introduced Monday that he said will create a clearer process for vendors, who will submit requests to Westfield’s Community Development Department.

“We want to encourage engagement in our community, not be stifling it, and we’ve obviously been seeing it happening since the shutdowns in 2020,” McCarty said. “Since then, food trucks have been popping up all over the place, and that was another reason why we needed to redo this.”

He said protections for brick-and-mortar restaurants will include prohibitions on food trucks in Grand Park Sports Campus and in the city’s Park Street restaurant district.

The ordinance would also establish a mobile food business license fee that will be $150 per year. The price would decrease to $100 after June 30, and license renewals would also be $100.

Operators would not need a permit if they operate in a planned unit development that permits food trucks, if they are at a city or Westfield Washington Schools event or if they are catering at a private event. Licenses would be required for operators serving food at a homeowners association event where the HOA does not already hold a permit or at a city park.

McCarty said Westfield has had a problem with non-licensed food trucks setting up shop in retail parking lots. Under the ordinance, people operating without a license would face a $1,500 fine for a first offense, $3,000 for the second and $5,000 for each subsequent offense.

McCarty said he studied municipalities “from South Bend to Evansville” to learn best practices about what cities charge food truck operators for licenses. He anticipates the state could eventually take a similar look at the fees municipalities charge as it has counties, which influenced the $150 annual rate for first-time vendors.

“We don’t want to be greedy,” he said. “We want to encourage startup businesses to be in our community and then possibly provide a pathway to be a brick-and-mortar business.”

He pointed to Big Hoffa’s Smokehouse and Ben’s BBQ Shack as two Westfield restaurants that began as food trucks.

“It’s obviously proven to be a working model,” McCarty said

Westfield Mayor Scott Willis said finding consistency with how the city regulates food trucks within the city is needed. He views the ordinance as a way to accommodate food truck operators while protecting local restaurant owners.

“We understand the value, and especially for the younger generation coming in. Food trucks are a big part of what they do around social entertainment,” Willis said. “But we also have to be fair to those who’ve been here for a while that’s really committed to the city and invested accordingly.”•