NEWTON — From a sushi truck to a New York waffle cart to a shipping container transformed into a kitchen, Apollo Carts has done it all.
Co-owners Norm Kerfoot and Vince White run the business and, as Kerfoot says, they were doing it "before it was a thing."
Tucked away in an industrial area in Newton, the business is "bursting at the seams," Kerfoot said.
So much so that they've had to find a new home, nearly tripling their space, from 4,000 square feet to 12,000.
The business started some 15 years ago, but Kerfoot first began in the industry Expo 86, when he worked for a company making coffee trucks.
That eventually led into him opening up his own business. The company built up a reputation in the U.S., he said, where the food truck industry was taking off at the time. As the business grew, their carts and trucks began to go overseas. They have shipped their work all over the world, including to the Middle East, Australia, Germany and Italy.
Then, roughly four years ago when Vancouver began its food truck program, "things really began to ramp up."
They were ripe and ready to fill that demand, and business has been booming ever since.
Kerfoot said the workload has doubled in the last five years, and he doesn't expect it to slow down. He estimates the company has built more than 1,000 carts, around 100 trucks and roughly 50 trailers.
Click here to read about Surrey's food truck pilot project, which was set to kick off on June 16.
They've done work for little companies, right up to the big names such as Original Joe's and Nestlé.
Sitting in his office, with machinery buzzing away in the background, Kerfoot said there have been a lot of interesting projects along the way.
Putting a full kitchen inside a hot pink Volkswagen van for Pig on the Street, which now churns out everything and anything bacon on Vancouver streets. Cutting holes in a brand new Mercedes-Benz. Installing wood-fired pizza ovens in a truck. Transforming an old motorhome into a potato truck.
And the company built the first food truck for a Canadian university. The Hungry Nomad was built for UBC, and the university now has another order in for two trailers, a food truck and a cart.
"It's always interesting," Kerfoot said.
He hopes to get an order for a beer truck soon, which he expects soon, with the recent liquor law changes in B.C. that will allow for sales of wine and craft brews at farmers' markets.
"We'll start to promote to craft breweries soon," he said.
But just because business is booming now, doesn't mean it was always that way.
"We've gone through hell and back," Kerfoot said. "There were times when we probably should have thrown in the towel, but we didn't."
They held on, and are sure glad they did, seeing as food trucks have taken off, now popular worldwide.
"It's been an interesting journey, to say the least," he said, adding that he doesn't think the food truck craze is a phase. "I think it's got a lot of life left in it yet. People were always saying to me, 'Well how long do you think you can build these carts for?' Well, I've been doing it for 15 years, and it's just getting busier."