New York Is Officially In the Midst Of A Food Truck Crackdown
- Photo via Free Williamsburg
Food trucks may be the avatar that represents the Brooklyn food scene to the rest of the world (and a faster, looser way for start-up food companies to launch themselves), but they’re still selling food to the public in exchange for money, and thus are beholden to a whole slough of rules and regulations. As of this week, the Health Department is cracking down on this.
The new regulations, which were proposed last summer and just made official, are really pretty reasonable. Among other things, it’s now officially a requirement that trucks dealing with raw meat have to have a sink on-site (you know, for hand-washing). On the more mundane end, operators will have to make sure that the trucks are logged in and out of their storage facilities with exact dates and times. Fair enough.
What might bother food truck die-hards, though, are potential regulations just proposed by City Councilman Dan Garodnick, who’s hoping to lock food trucks into designated spaces. This is actually great, if, like me, you like knowing exactly what your lunch options are at all times and don’t really enjoy following businesses on Twitter. It’s not so great, most likely, for a business model that’s based in large part on its flexibility, and it seems pretty inevitable that Garodnick will be met with more than a little bit of industry resistance on this. Still, the hand-washing thing seems pretty okay.
Follow Virginia K. Smith on Twitter @vksmith.
