Learn more about Entrepreneurial Chef Founder Shawn Wenner. It's a stark reality that you'll need more than "good food" to start a thriving restaurant or food truck. You'll also need to develop business and marketing chops to keep your business open for the long haul. Unfortunately, these important skills aren't usually taught in culinary school. Enter Shawn Wenner, who after almost 10-years of working at a culinary arts school chose to start the Entrepreneurial Chef, a magazine and educational platform created to help close the gap between food and entrepreneurship. In today's exclusive Q/A interview, we learn why [...]

If you own a food business such as a restaurant it can be difficult (some may say impossible) to find the time to take a single day off, much less an entire week of vacation. When owners finally pull themselves away from work, they find themselves thinking about their business, what needs to be done, and everything that might be slipping through the cracks without their supervision. Longterm this is not a healthy way to run a business or run your personal life. Today's post outlines how one food entrepreneur was able to finally get his time back and be [...]

Would you accept Bitcoin for your food truck? Bitcoin... You may have seen it reported in the news or heard relatives discussing it at the holiday dinner table. In the second half of 2017 to the beginning of 2018, the topic seems almost inescapable if you pay any attention to financial news reports. Some experts believe cryptocurrencies  like Bitcoin are the future of money and a more efficient way to store value than in banks. Others like investing legend Warren Buffet, believe these new forms of money will "certainly end badly" and this is nothing more than a [...]

Investigative journalist and broadcaster John Stossel and ReasonTV, published a new story titled "The Fight Against Food Trucks" earlier this month. The goal of the report was to find out if food trucks really are "bad" for restaurants as some politicians have claimed. Are food trucks just part of healthy competition or are they rouge businesses that aren't playing by the rules? Stossel aims to find the answer to this question in the video below that runs approximately 5 and a half minutes. So far this report has received over 20,000 views on YouTube alone. https://youtu.be/Y4dEtNFJ1bw The Advantages of Food [...]

Gary Vaynerchuck is arguably the most well-known entrepreneur and social media thought-leader on the planet. Throughout the year you can watch daily tidbits of him running his business his YouTube Channel that's rapidly approaching a million subscribers or Instagram. Vaynerchuck's company, VaynerMedia, provides marketing consulting from Fortune 500 companies to the biggest athletes in the world. But while attending a recent marketing conference, Vaynerchuck took some time out of his speaking schedule to offer some specific advice to a small business owner... specifically a food truck owner. If you're someone that's never heard of Gary Vaynerchuck don't worry! As background [...]

When emergencies happen, you need teams of highly-skilled people that can mobilize quickly and travel to a distressed area to help. In critical situations like this people like first responders, fire fighters, nurses, and law enforcement usually come to mind. These people are the first at the scene of a catastrophic event. But in recent months, seemingly unlikely food trucks have also been called upon to serve their communities after natural disasters. Food trucks answered this call by moving to support emergency workers and victims of storms like Hurricane Irma. When the power goes out and fresh water becomes non-existent [...]

This week you'll find M&R Specialty Trailers and Trucks at the Florida Restaurant & Lodging Show running from October 11th - 13th, 2017. This annual event is being held at the Orange County Convention Center and brings together over 8,000 professionals from across the culinary and food service industry. Whether you're looking for cutting-edge flavor combinations for your menu or looking to grow your existing restaurant franchise this Florida's premier event to accomplish these goals. If you plan to be in attendance, we encourage you to head on over to booth 1301 to say hi and check out our display. [...]

Hurricane Harvey has devastated the Texas coastline from Corpus Christi to Houston while uprooting thousands of families in between the two cities. For many residents, their businesses and homes have been completely destroyed. Some areas were hit hard by the hurricane winds. Others had walls torn down by rising and rushing water. According to this article from Fortune.com, the financial impact of Hurricane Harvey could top $180 billion. While there has been a level of destruction and damage the likes we haven't seen in the United States since Hurricane Katrina there are always examples of the resilience of the human [...]

We live in a world where customers read reviews and view food photos well before they ever step foot into a restaurant or dine at your food truck. That means that for many prospective customers, if you're online reputation isn't pristine you probably won't get their business. There was recently published article of MarketPlace.org that says negative Yelp reviews could actually be helping to put some restaurants out of business. The punch line of the article is that a restaurant with only two or three stars will be 14% more likely to go out of business in the event of [...]

According to this study from McKinsey & Company, a whopping 73% of foodservice activities have the potential to be automated. This report comes at the same time automation efforts in the transportation sector are in full-swing as well. Ten years ago, the average person may have felt driverless cars was something only dreamed up for sci-fi movies. Today, driverless cars are actively being tested by companies like Google and Tesla on real city streets. Some analysts have predicted that you will be able to buy a driverless car as soon as 2025. Even the pizza business is encountering further automation from [...]