Amy Shonka’s Intro to Culinary Arts class held their food truck displays and sampling on Wednesday, May 3.
“The trucks were a project for the students to come up with a creative truck to match a signature dish of their choice,” Shonka said.
Students set up all their components downstairs in the teachers’ lounge, leaving their signature dessert item out for staff and faculty to sample.
Along with a physical handmade truck model, students made their own business plans, which consisted of the brainstorming process, their initial planning, final plan/goal, and a section about the cooks.
The students were also required to create their own menu, with unique signature dessert item that related to their business name or truck.
“This was a graded assignment and was the biggest one besides the final,” Shonka said. “Students were required to do everything themselves and break up the work evenly.”
A typical workday for the students looked like a bit brainstorming, then a session of research, and then skimming cookbooks to find the ingredients for their menu’s dishes.
“I got to design our ‘Not Awful Falafel’ food truck,” junior George Kane said. “We wanted a vibrant truck with colors that blended, we chose red, green, and yellow because they were colors of countries’ flags where the falafel originates from.”
While there was much work that went into the projects, many students stated how they enjoyed it and thought it was a fun group task.
“Even though I was tasked with finding all the dishes’ ingredients, our truck’s concept and group made it a blast,” senior Scotty Scow said.
The winning food truck was “The Riviera” by juniors Nathan Fiedler, Graham Stephens, Michael Murray and Thuy Nguyen.
