Better Eating For SF Bay Area Truck Drivers!

Hello good folks,

I'm Yishan - from Mise, a food startup here in the Bay Area. A good truck driver friend of mine recommended that I reach out to you fine folk on this forum (he said you guys gave him great advice when starting up his career). We deliver dishes from local, professional chefs to people's doors, and customers reheat and enjoy on their own schedule via microwave or oven. We started out talking to a lot of tech professionals, but many are spoiled with food options like restaurant delivery, and aren't so physically restricted with food options like truck drivers and other professionals are.

I drive long distance a lot and see many truck drivers. It seems like fast food and greasy, oily, restaurant food are the primary options. And in the interest of living and eating better - there's gotta be a better solution to wholesome, awesome food on-the-go aside from say, oatmeal packets and trail mixes. Our are dishes cooked and sourced by local, professional chefs, who have specialized in that specific cuisine/dish for many years! Never any added preservatives, always made with local + organic ingredients when available.

We'd deliver it to your home on your off day, you can grab a few dishes for the road, store them in a cooler, reheat them with a microwave, and enjoy anytime (when you guys finally get a break!) Since truck drivers are working with all kinds of schedules, would this service still be of any help to you guys when it comes to nutrition on the road?

Hi Yishan.

I'm no longer on the road but as time goes on I'm ordering more and more of my food online because of the better selections available. Why limit yourself to your local grocery store, right? Especially for me because I'm in a small town with a small store.

It's certainly a challenge for drivers to eat healthy on the road. The truck stops don't often carry much of a variety of healthy foods and it's difficult to find the time to hit a grocery store during your travels. So we're always moving and our schedules and locations are totally unpredictable most of the time. We often don't even know when we're going to get home.

Quite honestly the best way to reach truck drivers is at a truck stop. No matter where we go, what our schedule is, or what we haul we always wind up back at a truck stop before long. If you could convince truck stops to carry your meals or deliver to truck stops that would be huge.

I would say the second best way would be at some sort of large distribution center or industrial park where there is a constant stream of trucks going in and out all day and night. That would also be a great opportunity, especially since trucks tend to sit for hours and hours waiting on appointments. You could easily contact drivers by CB radio or have signs with a phone number or something like that.

Now when you say you can deliver it to people's homes, are you using your own delivery trucks or can it be shipped through places like FedEx or UPS? If you're limited to a small area by using your own trucks you're going to have a tough time finding enough drivers in an area to make a go of it I think. If you can ship it anywhere it might be more feasible. But I think this is the toughest option for drivers because they just don't really know when they're going to be home exactly and when they are the last thing they're thinking about is ordering food so it's ready to go for their return to the road, ya know what I mean?

I think the most effective strategy would require you guys to go to where truck drivers are at - industrial parks and truck stops. If we can buy healthy foods without having to go out of our way or plan ahead for it then I think you're onto something.

Hey Brett!

Thanks for the speedy response and detail. :)

It is our own delivery fleet and we are limited to just the San Francisco Bay Area. One way would be if drivers in our area ordered their meals for the week and knew they would be at home on the Saturday (that's when we do delivery). They could stock their truck fridges in advance with the meals ready to go before embarking on their trip. So perhaps the best case would be to use the service BEFORE going on a trip, and not AFTER when everyone is understandably just trying to get home for a good night's sleep.

A very big obstacle would actually be convincing these truck stops to carry these dishes. We would like to be where everyone needs us, but as long as we're being strong-armed and bulldozed by Kraft and these other huge food companies (which endlessly pump out their factory "healthy" meals) - it will be hard to convince these truck stops to give us space in their fridge. Also the dishes wouldn't be fresh (frozen for who knows how long).

So in short, I think we could possibly help out with the meals preparation for BEFORE embarking on a long trip. Obviously, these truck drivers would have to live in our area (whether it's SF or San Jose or Santa Clara or Fremont), but having all these dishes in the drivers' hands, ready-to-go, for their own crazy schedules, to enjoy whenever they want!

Truck drivers don't have much room for say 3 weeks of meals let alone a week depending on the size or the meal and containers... So your best bet like Bret said catch us at truck stops and industrial parks....but you gotta consider the size of the meal....