Announced this morning in a tweet, the Chubby Chickpea Truck that serves the Boston area will no longer be kosher certified effective immediately.
Big changes at The Chickpea- effective immediately our truck has decided to give up its Kosher Certification. Love the KVH, just made sense.
— The Chubby Chickpea (@ChubbyFoodTruck) July 23, 2015
While it’s still unclear as to the motivations yet, two thoughts come to mind:
- With Clover Food Lab recently going kosher, including numerous food trucks, out fo nowhere there’s increased competition
- Costs of Kosher supervision were too high to justify staying kosher for them
This is obviously conjecture, but I’d definitely hang my hat on economic factors.
Ironically, we found the Chubby Chickpea truck in Boston less than 3 weeks ago on our trip there. Sad Boston is losing a kosher option where it is sorely needed.
The Chubby Chickpea food truck was incredibly unreliable. They frequently were not at the location they said they’d be when their schedule said they’d be there, and they couldn’t be bothered to use either Facebook or Twitter to update their customers about these digressions from their schedule. When people complained about it, they blew off the complaints without so much as a how-do-you-do. They didn’t seem to understand that when you’re specifically a _kosher_ food truck, people who keep kosher go out of their way to come to you, and when they get there and you’re not there, you’ve wasted their time and deprived them of lunch.
I complained to them in person once, on the spot, after they kept me waiting for a half-hour in sub-freezing temperatures in the middle of the winter. “You really can’t keep people waiting for a half hour in the cold like that,” I said. The owner’s response? “The great thing about owning a business is you can do whatever you want.” Yes, really, that was the first thing he said to me, and it didn’t get any better from there.
I’ve also heard from people that eating at their restaurant isn’t a particularly pleasant experience.
Note that the Rami’s food truck also has KVH certification and seems to be doing a bang-up business. In my opinion, their food is better than Chubby Chickpea’s, they’re where they say they’re going to be every day, and they communicate regularly with customers via Facebook and Twitter. Note, also, that the Rami’s truck has a mashgiach on the truck all the time, and he pulls his weight like any other employee on the truck, which means that the cost of kosher certification is incremental, since if they didn’t have the mashgiach they’d just have to hire somebody else to work on the truck.
I’m sure you’re right that the Chubby Chickpea is giving up their truck hashgacha for economic reasons, but I think the primary economic reason is that they don’t know how to run a food truck in a way that will attract and retrain loyal kosher-keeping customers.
Very interesting insight Jonathan. If you look at the Instagram post I embedded above, I found the truck before lunch time with the intention to go back to it during lunch time. They weren’t getting any traffic before lunch time and decided to leave, which left me high and dry with no lunch options as Milk Street Cafe was closed for the holiday weekend. (They did, however, have a mashgiach on board)
Seems like our experiences are similar.