Life Lessons

Building a Food Truck, Together Part Three — The Commissary

The final confusing but essential piece of the puzzle.

Inside of Truck Almost Finished, Cold Holding Station Missing on Right-Photo by Gary Janosz

In California, a food truck is not a stand-alone entity. It has to have a working relationship with a commissary kitchen.

I didn’t even know what a commissary kitchen was, nor had I ever heard of such a thing

Since we already had many food trucks in town, it was a good bet we had commissary kitchens as well — and we did, several. A commissary kitchen is a shared, commercial rental kitchen for food prep, cooking, cleanup, refrigeration, and dry storage. They quietly exist in warehouse districts and other out-of-the-way locations, and most people are never aware of their existence.

Recently there has been a little notoriety surrounding ghost kitchens. These are commercial kitchens that provide kitchen facilities for other restaurants or pop-ups — dining facilities that appear one day and are gone the next.

A food truck must have a commercial kitchen agreement such that after every event, the truck can return to the commercial kitchen for cleanup, utilizing its big sinks and abundance of hot water. The most useless but required piece of equipment in a…