The Best Cities for Food Trucks Matters for Corporate Office Parks
Tenant expectations are high. They expect top-notch commercial building amenities. What can you offer that your neighboring office parks don’t? What are the amenities that will set your campus apart?
According to Fooda (the mega partner for corporate food service at leading companies like Amazon, GM, Wayfair and Hyatt), the most sought-after corporate amenities for tenants are:
- Conference facilities with adjustable room sizes to accommodate large events.
- Reliable, fast Wi-Fi so employees can stay connected when they step outside the office.
- Easy access to parking and transportation for close access to where they need to be on campus.
- Dining options so employees don’t have to leave campus.
- Fully equipped fitness centers which include staff, classes, locker rooms and showers.
There’s more to this list, but you’ll need to come back again next week as we delve deeper into these topics. This week, we’re talking...
Dining Options.
Without on-site dining options, employees are forced to leave your campus to eat. We know that some office parks don’t have practical options for an on-site cafeteria or pop-up restaurant, but you can still allow workers to avoid racing around on their coffee or lunch breaks via food trucks.
We also know that having a food truck rotation can often just be a checkbox in a lengthy list of must-haves for your property, but they can bring real value to tenants when you foster good relationships with food truck operators. Through your connections with these mobile dining options, when your tenants want to offer catered meals as employee incentives and don’t know where to turn or have concerns about property liability and don’t understand how to work with COIs that ultimately protect your property, your tenant service coordinator can be a hero by saying “call Patrick and he’ll take care of you.”
The Best Cities for Food Trucks.
Food trucks are a $1.2 billion industry in the U.S. In recent years, they’ve become a common mainstay in many cities, offering a convenient alternative to traditional restaurants. In most areas, you would be hard-pressed to find people who haven’t eaten at one of these mobile gems.
A number of cities have embraced food trucks with open arms by limiting restrictions that made it difficult to start or operate food trucks, get permits and food safety inspections, or find locations to sell. As a property manager, why should you care about how popular food trucks are in your city? The answer is simple: bringing food trucks to corporate office parks is the # 4 most sought-after amenity by commercial tenants.
How favorable your city is to food trucks can impact your ability to offer food truck rotations to your tenants, an amenity we know they’re expecting. In fact, some companies even have written food truck rotations into their lease agreements which means the property is committed to this amenity for the long-term. If your city treats food trucks favorably, they'll likely be easy for you to find and schedule on your property...giving you rock star status. If your city makes operating a food truck difficult, your ability to schedule them on your property and service your tenants for private events may become a real challenge for you...leaving your tenants wanting more.
Clever, a data-driven real estate matching service, just published an updated list ranking the 50 most populous metro areas from the best to worst cities for food trucks. Analyzing data from Roaming Hunger, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Yelp, Google and others, along with weighted rankings of criteria like the proliferation of food trucks and restaurant supply stores per resident, rankings of each city’s food truck regulatory and operational climate, the cities walkability score, and Google searches for food truck terms, this is Clever’s Top 10 and Bottom 10 cities for food trucks:
The Top 10.
- Portland, OR
- Raleigh, NC
- Salt Lake City, UT
- Austin, TX
- Orlando, FL
- Denver, CO
- Oklahoma City, OK
- Providence, RI
- San Jose, CA
- Tampa, FL
The Bottom 10.
- Virginia Beach, VA
- Chicago, IL
- Detroit, MI
- Dallas-Fort Worth, TX
- Riverside, CA
- Cincinatti, OH
- Birmingham, AL
- Boston, MA
- New York City, NY
- Nashville, TN
Need Help with Your Food Truck Rotation?
If you’re looking for a way to bring food trucks to your property for the first time, need help managing the headache that dealing with mobile vendors can bring, or are looking for ways to better communicate with your tenants about amenities on your campus, learn more about MOBLZ features or schedule an appointment to talk with Becky, our dedicated MOBLZ solution representative who brings an amazing BOMA background that can understand your property’s needs.