By John Newsom john.newsom@greensboro.com
JAMESTOWN — In the world of food and dining, food trucks are The Next Big Thing.
Is it The Next Big Thing in higher education? Guilford Technical Community College hopes so.
This fall, the community college will offer a new culinary arts program in mobile catering and food truck management. The college says it’s the only one-year program of its kind in North Carolina and one of just a few like it in the nation.
“It addresses a need,” said Albert Schmid, director of the GTCC Culinary Arts and Hospitality Management program. “There are a lot of food trucks — a lot of really good food trucks. … It’s a big thing now and I think it’s a viable business option for students.”
The 42-credit program will take about a year and almost $3,200, plus books and knives, to complete. Graduates will earn a diploma. GTCC hopes to enroll up to 16 students next fall.
Meeting The Green Machine
Like GTCC’s traditional culinary track, students in the new program will learn basic cooking skills, safe food preparation, and food and beverage accounting procedures. Instead of learning about advanced baking or classical cuisine, students on the food-truck track will get classes in catering, how to run a small business and how to promote their truck on social media.
“They need to know how to prep food, do it safely and market their business,” Schmid said.
Students will take classes at GTCC’s main campus in Jamestown. The college is converting a bakery space into a food-truck kitchen — a compact space to give students practice cooking in cramped quarters. (Don’t worry, bakers. Schmid said the college has outgrown the current baking lab and is renovating space upstairs in the Koury Hospitality Careers building for a new one.)
The college last fall also bought a new food truck. Designed to be a mobile lab for students, the GTCC Green Machine is outfitted with a grill, griddle, deep fryer and a sandwich station. At 23 feet, it’s big enough to hold four cooks comfortably.
The truck’s exterior is outlined in LED lights. It also has a video screen to show the menu and speakers to play music or to let cooks talk to customers waiting outside.
Here to Learn
One thing the truck won’t do is show up at food-truck rodeos. State law prohibits public colleges from competing directly with the private sector, so the truck will cook largely on campus for now.
“The program is designed to help people get into the food-truck industry,” said LJ Rush, a GTCC culinary arts instructor who led the effort to create the college’s new program. “We’re not here to be in competition with the food-truck industry.”
Graduates will have a couple of options. They can open their own food truck or food cart. Or they can continue on in GTCC’s culinary program and get their associate’s degree in another year or so.
Leading The Way
GTCC’s program is a quicker — and cheaper — way for new chefs to become their own bosses.
Schmid said traditional brick-and-mortar restaurants might need $1 million or more to get started, and many head restaurant chefs spend years working their way up through the ranks. A food truck might need only about $100,000 or so to get rolling; a food cart might take only $50,000.
Rush said the idea for the program came from surveys that asked GTCC students about the courses they wanted the college to offer. When he started looking for food-truck programs at other colleges, Rush said he found nothing comprehensive — just a handful of classes here and there or certificate programs that take just a few weeks to complete.
Once the word about GTCC’s new program got out in culinary circles, Rush said his phone started to ring.
“We’re so looking forward to being the leader in this,” Rush said.
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