This new app wants to make it easy to find your favorite Charlotte food truck. But will it work?
Imagine: It’s lunchtime. You’re in your uptown office looking to grab a sandwich from a food truck. But which one? How do you find out which trucks are nearby?
Byron Brewer, 36, and Brandon Davis, 42, hope you’ll use the Charlotte Food Trucks app they launched this summer.
The app, which was developed by Atlanta-based Terry Brooks, a business contact of Brewer’s, is currently available on the iTunes App Store and Google Play Store.
Brewer and Davis, who met through Guys With Ties, came up with the idea July 4 weekend and the app launched at the end of July.
“We saw the need in Charlotte,” Brewer said. “Charlotte’s got a great food truck market. … We felt like there was all this information out there, but let’s funnel it into one place.”
What you’ll find on the app
The Charlotte Food Trucks app has a fairly simple interface, with buttons on the main page to take you to various functions, which include:
– Truck events: A calendar of events that, right now, is mostly made up of Food Truck Friday events around town.
– Main dish and Savory treats: A listing of food trucks based on type (you can sort by location). More than 70 trucks are currently listed. Listings include contact information, short descriptions, links to websites/Facebook and sometimes a menu. The listings are free for the trucks and there’s a portal for trucks to manage their listings on the app.
– Featured truck: Exactly what it sounds like.
– Book a truck: Allows you to fill out a form that is then sent to food trucks that fit your criteria if you’re looking to book a truck for an event, company lunch, etc.
– Special offers and Loyalty cards: Trucks can post offers and perks for customers.
– Charlotte weather: So you know if it’s about to be a rainy mess at Food Truck Friday.
“It’s a win win win,” Brewer said — Trucks get their information in front of customers, customers can find food trucks, and food truck event organizers can book trucks and list their event in the app.
But will it work?
When they came up with the idea for the app, Brewer and Davis researched the competition and realized, well, there isn’t much competition. There are a few national apps and apps for other cities, but none for Charlotte.
You can go to the websites, Facebook pages and/or Twitter pages of individual food trucks and events, but that’s time consuming. There are websites and Twitter pages that attempt to track the city’s trucks, but they aren’t always easy to navigate and aren’t always updated.
So there seems to be a market for an app that allows you to find and track food trucks in Charlotte. But is this the one?
Maybe, but it faces the same problem that those websites and Twitter accounts face: The app relies on trucks to actually tag their location, and keep their information and menu updated. If the trucks (and food truck events) don’t buy in and use the app, it won’t work. It will be full of wrong locations and outdated menus.
Prime example: I fired up the app yesterday evening in uptown and filtered the trucks by location. Many of the trucks that were “nearest to me” either had locations like “On the corner” or “On the move,” or the location defaulted to Trade and Tryon. (I also used the app during other times of the day and found the same issue.)
“I mean, it is going to be reliant on the food truck owner to pin his location, but hopefully they understand the benefits of the app, that if they do pin their location, then people will come,” Davis said.
To be fair, it’s early. The app has been out for less than a month. It will take time to see if people start using it and if the trucks start using it more. Davis and Brewer can also take feedback they’ve received and tweak the app to fit the needs of customers and food truck operators.
And, at least to my knowledge, there’s not a better option out there. (If you know of one, please let me know.)
“I look at the competition out there and it’s lacking,” Brewer said. “We want to get feedback, we want to get (the food trucks) on there. Our focus is communicating with them and letting them know what the features are so that way once it’s up and fully listed and everyone that wants to be on there is on there … it’s just a matter of getting as many downloads as possible.”
Photo: Diedra Laird/Charlotte Observer
This story was originally published August 16, 2016 at 1:34 AM with the headline "This new app wants to make it easy to find your favorite Charlotte food truck. But will it work?."