<p><span style="font-size: medium;"><strong>Starting the Food Cart</strong></span></p> <p>Today’s food carts seem more like laboratories than itinerant eateries. If you’re looking for a prime space to test new media and mobile payment platforms, look no further than the food cart.</p> <p>Gone are the days of getting greasy receipts with your greasy meats from the back of a van. Instead, we find kitchens in Airstream trailers and retrofitted delivery trucks serving up goat-cheese mousse waffles and BBQ brisket tacos -- all while tracking their transactions with the latest devices and pushing promotions online.</p> <p>As meals-on-wheels businesses become upwardly mobile, so too do the technologies they employ -- from broadcasting their varying locations on Twitter and deals on Foursquare to using apps and Square readers for payments.</p> <p>In this first part of our Mobile Food video series, “Starting the Food Cart,” we spent time with mobile restaurants around New York and Portland -- observing and interviewing proprietors about how they got started and how technology shapes the industry.</p> <p>In the coming days, we’ll be sharing two more videos. “Powering the Food Cart” will look at how mobile food businesses employ the latest payment technologies. Meanwhile, “Promoting the Food Cart” will explore how social media is used to promote these carts and build closer connections with customers.</p> <p><iframe src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/Pu1CcazHOSU" width="520" height="293"></iframe></p> <!-- BEGIN KAPOST ANALYTICS CODE --> <script type="text/javascript">// <![CDATA[ var _kapost_data = _kapost_data || []; _kapost_data.push([1, "4fd0c8252efec80001002833", "4f7a1564e8f5360001000868", "4fce7dcb63af1f0001000117", escape("Media")]); (function() { var ka = document.createElement('script'); ka.async=true; ka.id="kp_tracker"; ka.src="http://savoy-prod.heroku.com/javascripts/tracker.js"; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ka, s); })(); // ]]></script> <!-- END KAPOST ANALYTICS CODE -->