The Working World

Redux: Will Meals on Wheels be the Next Boom?

Looking back at the Great Depression to see the path ahead.

Will Meals on Wheels be the Next Boom?
A hot dog tale.

Good-bye filet mignon, hello meatloaf. As the recession rages, Americans are finding ways to chow on the cheap. Consumers are shifting food purchasing patterns. We’re trading down to private label and value brands. We’re eating out less, and getting more aggressive about buying products on sale. Fast food joints are luring us by including more premium items on their dollar menus. High end retailers like Whole Foods are feeling the heat as the organic revolution slows. Many of use are doing without that Starbucks latte.

As early as August, 2008, The LA Times reported that All-American Hot Dog Carts in Miami, the country’s largest maker of pushcarts, was breaking annual sales records. Could meals on wheels be the next recession boom?

Hot dogs made their first recorded appearance in Chicago at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. But it was cart vendors who pushed the hot dog to national fame during the Great Depression. For a nickel, a hard-pressed person could get a filling meal. Hot dog stands were among the few businesses to thrive during the country’s worst financial crisis. Some of those street corner salesmen went on to become millionaires. In 1941, a man named Carl Karcher bought a hot dog stand in Los Angeles. Business was so brisk that he soon had a small flotilla of gleaming carts. By the 1950s, Mr. Karcher had started the Carl Jr.’s restaurant chain, which grew into an empire of 100 restaurants by 1975.

In hard times, low-cost self-employment offered by hot dog vending looks better than ever. An entrepreneur named Don Cowan sells a variety of carts from Methuen, Mass. His how-to guide, Start Your Business In 10 Easy Steps: Operating Your Hot Dog Cart Tips, is available on his Web site for $50, refundable with cart purchase. The sleek “New Yorker” model, with its cheerful blue-and-yellow umbrella, can be yours for $2,599. Cowan offers a compelling sales pitch to would-be vendors: “Not only does operating a Hot Dog Cart offer you an excellent income opportunity, it offers something that is even more important to some of us. That is the opportunity to BE YOUR OWN BOSS.”

Hard to argue with that, Don.

Delicious low-cost food, mobile or otherwise, is a fine thing, and frustratingly scarce in New York, the city of fast-moving pedestrians who eat on the fly. Not everybody is fortunate enough to live near Café Habana or ‘WichCraft. Certainly most of us don’t have time to stand in line at the Shake Shack. So we’re forced to make do with ubiquitous diners that serve up sub-standard meals and pizza/falafel/Chinese joints whose products vary wildly in quality. As for the food percolating in slime under the nose-guards at corner delis, pass the vomit bag.

Hot dog carts have their charm, but there’s that lack of running water for important tasks like, uh, hand-cleansing. The health profile of the average dog is grim, and it’s tricky to compartmentalize what we know of hot dog contents in order to enjoy them. In 2006, Jeremy Spector raised the bar with his Dogmatic Dogs pushcart on Bleeker Street, offering beef and turkey dogs made from organic, humanely-raised animals. Alas, his umbrella is now closed, but in October, 2008 Dogmatic moved to a brick-and-mortar location on E. 17th Street. Jeremy was ahead of the curve, and hopefully more culinary trend-setters will follow in his cartwheel tracks.

What we need is a little innovation. Despite the scarcity of food during the Depression, lots of new items hit American menus: Spam, Kraft macaroni and cheese, Toll House chocolate chip cookies, Bisquick, Krispy Kreme doughnuts, Ritz Crackers, and Wonder Bread (sliced) all made their debut. Colonel Harland Sanders developed a secret spice formula to enhance the fried chicken at his Sanders Court and Café (motel and restaurant) in Corbin, Kentucky. Thinking up creative ways to deliver satisfying food cheaply became an art, shaped by necessity.

In the current economic dip, expect to see more pushcarts on the street, better quality offerings, and established restaurants venturing into pushcart territory. But here’s the ultimate challenge for the culinary entrepreneur: Come up with a new, nasty, high-quality snack to sell. Forget the traditional ho-hum offerings and puh-lease enhance the dubious sanitation. We need something new. Something easy to carry. Neat to eat. We’re hungry for a snack with a catchy name that can capture our hearts as well as our stomachs, just as the hot dog did in days of gore.

There’s a gastronomic triumph waiting for someone, and a fortune to be made.

Tags: entrepreneurs, food, Great Depression, Redux