Portland has a reputation as a street food paradise. Carts dot the cityscape, parked next to breweries or grouped into pods.It’s hard to pinpoint an exact number, but the city has About 500 food carts, spread across dozens of pods with cocktail bars, fire pits, taprooms, playground equipment and more. And the cart itself is an incubator for some of the city’s finest chefs, who become local culinary legends. Like Nong Punsuk Wattana in Nong Khao Man Gai. Netflix Crew and National magazine For over a decade, we’ve been celebrating the city’s food cart pods and their chefs. Pissed off at the trailer window, we ordered the Guyanese his bake, the Italian panzerotti, the North African tagine, or the Scandinavian salmon-stuffed lefse.
But now, state food cart regulation changes that took effect on New Year’s Day threaten the industry’s survival. Back in 2018, the Oregon Department of Health updated the state’s food cart regulations with the help of food cart owners, Department of Environmental Quality representatives, and other organizations. Many of the policies were horribly outdated It’s been 30 years since it was last updated, but one change targeted at the state’s wastewater policy for food carts has been particularly troubling for the industry. Historically, food carts have treated their wastewater, also called gray water, in three ways: emptying the cart’s small wastewater tank, connecting it to the sewer system, or most commonly collecting hundreds of gallons of large plastic wastewater. Drain the wastewater several times a month when you use the cube. According to the Oregon Department of Health, those cubes weren’t legal, has only been used locally for the last decade. The new rule explicitly states that tanks used to store wastewater must be “integral with the unit”, i.e. a physical part of the cart, effectively banning the use of storage cubes.
From the perspective of food cart owners, compliance with the new policy will dramatically increase the cost of doing business, and some have already closed because of it. Here are the details of the regulatory change and what it means for the scene as a whole.
Why were laws made?
According to the Oregon Department of Health, these policy changes are primarily related to two potential risk factors associated with these large cubes. Rodents can pose a variety of food safety issues. Erica Van Ess, Interim Manager of Food, Pool and Accommodation Health and Safety Programs at OHA, said: video press release“There’s nothing specific to a pod location or an individual operator about this. We’ve seen these same public health concerns statewide in a variety of scenarios.” It went into effect in 2020, but a three-year grace period gave food carts additional time to become compliant.
What is the impact on carts?
Over the past few years, as more people have left the restaurant industry in favor of a more scrappy business model, these plastic cubes have become a go-to solution for many food cart owners. The on-board wastewater tanks for are much smaller than those cubes (mostly less than 100 gallons, a few dozen) and food cart pods with sewer connections are very hard to find.
Empty those tanks depending on the size and company. Cost approximately $90-$200 per visit From wastewater treatment services. Depending on the cart, relying on on-board tanks means treating wastewater daily or every other day instead of once a week or several times a month.
According to founder Leah Tucker, Oregon Mobile Food Associationonly two companies in the Portland metropolitan area were able to pump directly from their graywater tanks, and both were heavily overbooked even before this policy took effect. The alternative to doing so is also not viable for many. According to pod owners, the average price of a sewer hookup for a pod is between $70,000 and $100,000. talked with Oregonian. and some food cart The pods have a sewer connection, but those pods have higher rents than some carts can afford, even if there are vacancies.
According to Van Ess, carts can empty wastewater themselves at 20-gallon intervals at approved locations (such as RV dumpsters). It was a low-cost and popular disposal method for decades before the cube came along.In Tucker’s view, hand-carrying buckets of wastewater poses the same problem of potential contamination. “There is a cost factor associated with using these cubes,” she says. “But the bigger problem we face is the availability of resources to do what we need to do safely.”
How did kart react?
Some carts were moved to pods with sewer connections. Papi Sal’s and Meliola PastaSome have been completely closed as marble queenJess Mummery, co-owner of Papi Sal’s, has seen her cart move to three separate locations in the two years it’s been open, but not long-term, especially considering current policy changes. nothing feels sustainable. “The new regulations are putting a lot of people in a difficult situation,” she says. “must be empty [the tank] Every day my schedule gets messed up. “
What would the stall owner want to do instead?
In a perfect world, Tucker would like states to abandon this policy altogether. Her argument: These tanks are often owned by pump companies. So it feels unfair to her and other cart owners to put the blame on the cart owner rather than the company that manages the tank. And removing the cube entirely is like throwing the baby out with the wastewater.
“Certainly we need better regulation. We have environmental problems that we have to deal with,” says Tucker. In her view, the responsibility for making sure the cubes are compliant should lie with the pumping companies. These pumping companies can deal directly with carts if the cart owner is somehow using them in a harmful way.
at least, Cart owners want state to give people extensions To comply — 6 months to 1.5 years, to be safe. In late January, Jim Millar and Breckin VanRaalte, who owned the now-closed food cart Meliora Pasta, wrote a letter to James Schroeder, interim director of the Oregon Department of Health, asking for an extension. Despite the period, many cart owners say they only learned about the new policy months or weeks ago. In their letter, Millar and VanRaalte estimated that more than half of the hood his cart owners in Multnomah County were unaware of the new policy change.
The Oregon Department of Health says it Not interested in shutting down the cart for this issue, and health inspectors work with cart owners to help them comply. We may close your cart if you choose to do so. “Really, the best way for businesses to spend their energy at this point is to reach out to your local public health officials and talk to them about their thoughts on compliance.” van es says“This should be a workable solution and your county health department is here to help you work on it.”
Whether this policy is effective or not, this narrative shows that the food cart industry is far more volatile than lawmakers admit. is just one of countless problems that have been grappling with in recent years. Extreme weather forces carts to shut down in freezing temperatures and dangerous heat waves. The boom in food cart openings has saturated the market, making it less noticeable. And, of course, there are issues that the entire food service industry has been dealing with over the past few years, including rising food costs, problems with his supply chain, rising rents, and the ongoing impact of his COVID-19.
Policy makers came together to rewrite Oregon’s food cart regulations because they were outdated decades ago. At the time, the state only had a few hundred carts in total. Things are very different from 30 years ago, where rules were built around food carts being mobile above all else. But that doesn’t reflect the nature of Portland’s food carts today. For years, decades, carts have parked in single pods and used mobile food units as small restaurants. Here’s how to get started cooking without spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in initial costs. Perhaps the biggest problem with this new policy is the industry and state’s mismatched understanding of what food carts really are. As the world of foodservice becomes more turbulent, developing a set of rules to keep diners safe and maintain the scene will affect not only the health of the industry, but entire cities.
