Every festival-goer has been familiar with it for a long time: you can get food from an old-timer van. And preferably a hip dish from a van with a funny name on the roof. The number of food trucks, literally ‘food bus’, is on the rise across the country. In Drenthe, the number has increased from 22 to 51 in five years.
The growth, which is apparent from figures from the Chamber of Commerce, comes as a surprise to Leonie Pluyter. She is organizing the Barrel Food Truck Festival in Emmen, which will be held at the Raadhuisplein this weekend. “We mainly see that people have stopped using the food truck in corona time.”
There are 17 trucks at the festival in Emmen this year. That is less than in the past, but significantly more than in recent years, when the festival was canceled due to corona measures. The food truck was on the rise in the years before the corona crisis. Many starting entrepreneurs were therefore hit hard by the measures, including Marlon Bieze from Stadskanaal. He had just made his last payment when he saw his earnings dry up.
“I had planned for a year, but corona threw a spanner in the works,” says Bieze. His caravan, bearing the name Nachos by Macho’s, mainly produces Mexican-inspired products: chili con or sin carne, brownies with red pepper and nachos with melted cheese. “The great thing about nachos is that you can actually throw anything on top of it. You can go the Mexican way, or sneaky another side.”
Marlon Bieze on his reboot with Nachos by Macho’s: