It was a trip to the Bay Area that finally did Matt Patrick in.
He and his friend Hank Grant went to attend a wedding in Sonoma, but took a trip into the city and found themselves having a beer in a formerly vacant lot filled with food carts made from converted shipping containers.
“That was it,” he says. “I just couldn’t wait anymore.”
He pulled Grant aside on the trip and pitched him on starting a similar food park in Boulder. Grant, who had been working in app development for the last several years saw the potential and came on board, bringing his business partner, Justin Riley, on as well.
“It’s just like most things in the startup world,” says Patrick. “You have a notebook full of ideas, and then you wait for the right motivations or partners.”
The trio got to work on the project in March of this year, and officially signed a lease this week, right after their Kickstarter campaign to help fund the project wrapped up with a fundrais ing total of nearly $5,000 over the trio’s goal of $40,000. While just a few weeks ago the Boulder Food Park was an idea with some interest and energy, it is now a practical reality in the process of happening.
Currently, the space that will one day be the Boulder Food Park doesn’t look like much, just an anonymous wedge of overgrowth at the edge of an industrial park. But it’s a somewhat unique spot. For starters, it’s undeveloped — a rare enough sight in Boulder — with a canopy of large trees and scenery courtesy of a waterway and the occasional passing train. But the big thing is that it’s a unicorn of a location, centrally-ish located on the east end of Pearl Street, in a business-heavy area with a lot of employees — potential diners — and yet far enough away from brick and mortar restaurants so as not to clash with Boulder’s ban on food truck operation within 150 feet of restaurants and residential districts. Patrick and his partners found the spot by beginning with a map of Boulder to find areas that weren’t in the forbidden zone.
The team behind the Boulder Food Park doesn’t really see the park as a shot across the bow at the city regarding those regulations, simply a good opportunity with a side-effect of potentially relieving some of the tension surrounding them.
“We’re not setting out to be the savior of anything,” Patrick says. “We just want to be a creative option. This isn’t the big social movement I’m looking to rally against my city with.”
But based on their studies of other food truck rich cities like Austin, San Francisco and Portland, the trio all feel that once the food park is in place and its effects can be observed as positive, the city will likely soften its stance on food trucks.
One of those positive effects Patrick, Grant and Riley are excited about is bringing food to an underserved neighborhood.
“What we’re doing by building this is providing food to the more than 1,000 employees that work in walking distance,” says Patrick.
Those employees won’t all fit in the park at once, though. It’s more likely to have a capacity in the neighborhood of 200. But the final numbers won’t be known until the park is completed.
As for when that will be, Patrick predicts a late-fall soft opening with a grand opening in late spring, though there are obviously a lot of moving parts.
The finished park will feature a rotating cast of food trucks, with five to seven there on any given day, as well as a covered outdoor seating area and a beer garden made from a shipping container, both of which should make the park an all-weather affair.
Patrick says that the scheduling of the trucks will also ensure a variety of price points, in addition to a rotating menu, to be sure that no one is priced out of the park.
“I know with my kids I’m not going to buy them a tasty $12 pork belly sandwich,” Patrick says. “They prefer hot dogs.”
The beer will be another rotating localpalooza, with an estimated 15 to 20 taps, of which eight to 10 will be from a rotating monthly featured brewery.
The finished Boulder Food Park will also include some outdoor park games and feature a small stage for live, primarily acoustic, music.
“We’re not going to have any KISS cover bands or anything,” says Riley.
The facility will also be available for rental for private functions.
The trio’s long-range plans include hopes that the Boulder Food Park will become a hub and potential meeting space for community activities, and that its business model might prove to be exportable so that the team can potentially set up other similar food parks in Boulder’s neighboring cities.
“We’re not reinventing the wheel,” says Grant. “There’s a lot of existing food parks.”
“If we can become an advocate for food trucks to have a home, that’d be the goal,” says Patrick.
But according to Patrick, the wide network of support the Boulder Food Park has already received, everything from local press to contributions to the Kickstarter campaign to his neighbors chatting him up about it, is indicative that there are big things to come.
“I think the city is ready for something like this,” he says.
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