Phoenix is home to a wide array of food trucks; these are their stories. To read the last installment of the Phoenix Food Trucks series, click here.
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Pizza People arrived at Food Truck Fridays for the first time Feb. 3. Wait times grew, and the line of eager pizza enthusiasts was long. MaryBeth and Tim Scanlon worked hard to keep up with the pace.
“Our challenge is that we make everything fresh to order,” MaryBeth said. “It’s a little bit longer for those who want to get in and out on their lunch hour, we are finding out.”
Pizza People is a recent addition to the Phoenix Street Food Coalition and a new element of the Friday food-truck gathering at Phoenix Public Market. The business venture of couple MaryBeth and Tim Scanlon has in a short time proved to be a difficult yet profitable endeavor. The two keep busy serving the classic Italian dish to eager patrons.
James Crowley, a public relations sophomore at Northern Arizona University, was in Phoenix for a student convention when he happened upon Food Truck Fridays. He believes pizza is supposed to be greasy, and was not disappointed. He was also pleased with the meal because it reminded him of home.
“My hometown is in Austin, Texas,” Crowley said. “There, you can’t get any decent food unless it is out of a food truck.”
William Oglesby, 38, is studying nonprofit leadership and management at ASU and has been coming to Food Truck Fridays for about a year. Oglesby is partial to pizza and was taken with the flavor of Pizza People’s food.
“I was actually going to get a hot dog, but I saw that there was a pizza truck, and I said, ‘I’m going there,’ ” Oglesby said.
The Scanlons met through mutual friends, although they had shared the same group of friends for seven years without meeting each other. Eventually, they met at a friend’s birthday party and had a date scheduled for the next week.
“It was over after that,” joked MaryBeth.
After two years of marriage, the couple decided to invest their savings into spending more time together.
“We wanted to be in the restaurant business, but we didn’t want to own a restaurant,” MaryBeth said. “So we decided to go into a food-truck business.”
They bought an empty shell of a food truck that had belonged to ASU. It wasn’t a traditional start, since Tim and MaryBeth acquired the truck before finishing their business plan or recipes.
Efficiency was on the the couples’ minds when they decided to go into the food-truck business. Aside from loving pizza, they wanted a complete meal package, MaryBeth explained.
They outfitted the truck with a pizza oven and refrigerator and went to work on a secret pizza recipe and a business plan. The artistry of dough-making turned out to be harder than they anticipated.
“That proved to be very challenging because I am not a baker and I didn’t realize that making dough was such a science,” MaryBeth said. “Tim and I together researched, researched and researched and came up with our own recipe, and one day, it worked.”
The bylaws of the Phoenix Street Food Coalition say food trucks must obtain at least 30 percent of their products locally. With meat from Schreiner’s Fine Sausage, seasonal vegetables from farmers’ markets, and the remainder from Arizona-based grocer Bashas’, Pizza People out-performs that requirement. Shopping at Bashas’, MaryBeth said, is helpful because it supports local farms.
There were many lessons the couple were unprepared for when they started the business. Early on, they were scheduled for a school-fair gig, alongside another food truck and coffee truck. The other food truck broke down before the fair, so Pizza People became the only food available.
That didn’t shake the Scanlons much. Although there were long lines, they worked through the crowd, churning out pizza after pizza with the register dinging away.
“And then our propane went out,” Tim said.
Their propane tank had sprung a leak and ran out completely, so they couldn’t cook the pizza. They had to stop operations and refund all the people waiting on their orders. The organizer was not pleased when they had to tell him he had no more food, Tim said.
“We heard a little girl crying, ‘Mommy! You promised me pizza!’ ” MaryBeth said.
The propane tank was replaced, and the couple learned the first of many lessons about the food-truck industry.
The Scanlons prepare pizza dough in a restaurant’s kitchen during the establishment’s closed hours through what is called a commissary agreement, Tim said. This arrangement, which ensures the business maintains the legal temperature for dough-making, can be difficult, he said. The physical struggle of carrying ingredients in and out of the truck presents another difficulty.
“I’ve lost 15 pounds without changing my diet or exercising,” Tim said. “I climb in and out of this truck about 50 times a day carrying ingredients and propane, when before, I just sat at a desk in front of a computer.”
No definite plans are in the works, but the Scanlons have ambitions of owning another truck — a bigger truck, if they can afford one. That way, they can be in two places at once when they have conflicting events they would like to serve.
“But I won’t reveal the (pizza’s) secret ingredient,” MaryBeth said.
Contact the reporter at dmzayas@asu.edu
