Enjoy some pictures from the 2011 First Annual Food Truck Festival held at Santa Anita Race Track in Arcadia, CA

The Food Truck Festival was held January 29, 2011, from 11am-4:30pm.
There was a beer garden and several dozen food trucks.

Cons:
Long lines
Long waits
Disorganized
Food ran out of many trucks
Too many people and tickets sold(way too many), estimated 1o,000, probably more with all the people from the track that didn’t know about it and wanted to get in.
The majority of people would probably not go back again, unless there was some sort of credit.

Pros:
Nice day
First festival, so we can expect better organization for the second, with all the feedback we provide.

Everyone is going to be keeping an eye on the Union Station Food Truck Festival TruckItFest, to see how it goes.

Recommendations: Limit offerings of each truck to speciality items that can be prepared quickly.
perhaps implement food tickets, i.e. worth $2 each for purchasing food truck items, those tickets can then be redeemed by the food trucks for purchases made at their trucks.
even with 100 people in line a food truck should be able to deliver all the food to those people within 1 hour.

The art of food truck festivals is something that is developing, there is no perfect science, and we will see them develop if they are to continue, people will always be attracted to food trucks as the trend has been escalating in popularity in past years.
Upcoming events like the Union Station festival taking place in March, we hope will learn to optimize from what we are seeing at other events, organizers are looking to make money, but at what cost? Will people go back or complain loudly if they have a bad time? I would say that limiting the # to something reasonable so that you never have more than 20-30 people in any one line is key, once you hit 100+ people in a line you have a serious problem and that needs to be dealt with quickly, because someone or many people will be disappointed.

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One of the quotes:

“Ticket sales are unbelievable. Every six hours we’re selling 500 hundred tickets,” Quinn said enthusiastically.

Apparently they didn’t have a limit?

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If you want to reach one of the organizers of the event: