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Camosun sets table for food truck service next month

Food truck will give students real-life experience

It can serve fish and chips but it’s no fry truck.

Camosun College’s culinary arts program is launching a first, a food truck that will be student run and serve food on campus and in the community, hopefully starting in June.

Its cuisine will range in style from wraps, to burgers, to salads and French fries. It gives students a professional cooking environment. Chef Steven Walker-Duncan, program chair for Camosun’s culinary arts program said the truck will serve food on both Camosun’s Interurban and Lansdowne campuses. He’ll be careful the truck doesn’t compete directly against the local food truck community, though it will entertain going to certain events.

“It’s the only food truck in a culinary program that we’ve heard of, at least in Western Canada, and I’ve heard we’re envied for it,” said Walker Duncan.

The food truck trended has grown rapidly across North America in the last two decades, particularly because the barrier of entry is easier and more flexible than a brick and mortar restaurant. The costs are up to two thirds less and if the location isn’t working, a truck can find a new one.

For the past few months the truck has been undergoing a refit in the newly upgraded Camosun trades buildings at Interurban and currently sits behind the Centre for Trades and Innovation.

A former FedEx vehicle, it had already undergone the transition to food truck when Camosun purchased it. However, it was packed with deep fryers, which have since been replaced (worry not, there’s still a fryer). The college has also refit most of the truck’s kitchen old equipment with new stoves and the various apparatus, vents and hood fans, that are necessary to cook the type of foods it will offer.

“We didn’t see the FedEx logo until we pulled off the old graphics,” Walker-Duncan said.

Students in Camosun’s visual arts program are designing a wrap that will cover most of the truck’s sides, and a unique one for the front, Walker-Duncan said.

It’s an interdisciplinary project with several Camosun programs having a hand in it, Walker-Duncan said.

“Everybody is having a hand in it, the hood fans were reconfigured by the sheet metal department, electrical students are swapping in a new electrical panel, it’s an encompassing project.”

Among those chipping in are students from the graphic novel design program, who are designing a graphic wrap for the truck.

“The wrap will include all the different departments as though they are in line waiting for food,” Walker-Duncan said. “You’ll see students from welding, sheet metal, business, marketing and more in an eye-catching original piece.”


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