Tag: Jersey Shore

In a country-industrial stretch of Hammonton halfway between Philadelphia and Atlantic City sits a concrete-block maze of machine shops, where workers have built thousands of stainless-steel hot-sandwich and coffee carts and catering trucks.

This is the one-story home of Custom Mobile Food Equipment, which for 74 years has built these customized portable kitchen-storefronts of varying sizes, and kept them on the road with extra helpings of customer support. They roll onto Jersey Shore boardwalks and Center City street corners, at weeklong public festivals and private events across America, and in fancy resorts and on military bases abroad.

It’s a South Jersey fixture, with Camden roots and deep Philly ties.

“We started small,” with hot dog carts cut to fit, not block, city sidewalks, said Custom vice president David Kyle. He said his family helped Philadelphia officials write the city’s street vendor ordinances, and made sure the carts fit.

Custom has outlasted food fashions and changes in the ways workers lunch. Kyle said he’s confident the enterprise will outlast recent inflation, global competition, and import tariffs: “A lot of our business is repeat business, and the big names we go after,” he said during a tour of the plant. “People rely on us to turn out a product that will last.”

From pony-cart produce to theme-park fixture

Lehigh Valley-based Wild Bill’s Craft Beverage Co. serves its old-fashioned sodas from kegs mounted in Custom vehicles of several sizes. They sell drinks at crowded motorcycle rallies in Gettysburg and Sturgis, S.D., the Ohio State Fair, the Great State of Maine Air Show in Brunswick, San Diego Comic-Con, and Schuylkill regattas.

“These are high-end, unique stands. We have 60 of them. We add a couple a year,” said Wild Bill’s chief executive, Mike Quilty. “One of our franchisees in Utah just drove one of Custom’s self-propelled Ford barrel wagons to Vancouver.”

To make trips like that, the equipment has to be built well, Quilty said, noting Custom’s “unlimited support” for when technical issues arise, which doesn’t require buying a service contract.

Custom’s late founder, William Sikora, developed the catering truck in the early 1950s as a kitchen on wheels installed on a Detroit-made chassis. Sikora as a grade-school kid in Camden had sold vegetables from a pony-drawn cart, then opened a grocery. He bought apartment buildings and diners, and became a top officer of First Peoples Bank.

Walking room to room past heavy presses and cutters on the Hammonton shop floor, Sikora’s grandson Kyle said 40 workers build more than 100 pieces of equipment a year — food trucks, trailers, catering wagons, specialty equipment with kitchen-sized stoves, refrigerators, freezers.

“We’ve sold to Disney World and SeaWorld, Sesame Place, and U.S. bases in Japan,” Kyle said on a muggy midsummer morning as room fans, metal-forming machinery, and new-cart test motors whirred. “We have 18 projects going right now.”

Custom built 32 commercial kitchens on caster wheels for Carnival Cruise Line’s Calypso Lagoon in the Bahamas, which opened last year, with rounded bull-nose counters instead of sharp industrial edges to accommodate peak work flow.

How much does it cost to launch a kitchen cart?

Today, Custom’s basic Model 525 carts retail for around $6,500. For that sum, plus storage, food, fuel, and licensing costs, “you’re in business serving food,” said Kyle.

“It’s rewarding, you get to meet so many kinds of people,” he added.

New catering trucks start at more than $125,000, like a high-end camper.

All the carts and trucks are built from stainless steel sides, stamped with Custom’s distinctive elongated-diamond pattern over tubular steel framing. The company uses multiple steel suppliers, including Allegheny Ludlum Steel Corp. in Pittsburgh. It was harder to find domestic steel when the U.S. auto industry demand was stronger, Kyle said. But now materials costs are much higher, often in response to higher tariffs.

“We try to use built-in-USA [materials], but some stuff you cannot get here,” Kyle said. Robertshaw Controls, for example, makes the only burner controls that fit Custom’s standards. They moved the operation to Mexico from Texas, so Custom now imports them.

Cart metal is just one inflating cost vendors face, said Christian Subashi, second-generation owner of Loudogs hot-dog carts in Sea Isle City. Refrigerators were 50% cheaper before last year’s new tariffs, he said, and sausage prices have “gone through the roof.”

Kyle said his company’s hot-dog cart price “has gone up $1,000 or $2,000 in 10 years,” lower than the general inflation rate. “We have to absorb some. It’s how you do business,” he said. He’s confident steel prices will stabilize eventually.

The future of food carts

The company has no plans to automate, Kyle said. “All our products are custom built — handmade and hand-fabricated. No two carts are exactly alike,” he said, noting that the company also retrofits and rehabs units as needed. “They can last forever.”

“Our pricing is more, but it lasts longer than assembly-line stuff coming in from Mexico or China at low cost.”

One once-robust market that has all but evaporated is carts for vendors who work construction sites. Custom employed over 100 during the building boom of the late 1990s. The company built a catering truck a day, on average, back then; now it’s closer to one a week.

“Wawa and DoorDash are delivering deli trays to jobs sites now. And Wawa has built out so many stores in their area, guys can just leave the job and run to Wawa. So that business is down for us,” said Kyle.

The focus now is on larger orders that can be built more efficiently. Plus it’s gotten harder, Kyle said, to hire skilled craftsmen.

Local buyers of carts and trucks include Shore ice cream and water-ice vendors, as well as the food vendors that sell at breweries, thanks to the New Jersey’s restrictions on breweries serving food

But Custom is also very much “a national brand,” said James Evans, who runs the food-truck division for Ocean City-based Manco & Manco Pizza, including eight Phillies stadium locations.

Like Custom, Manco is a third-generation South Jersey business, and Evans said he wouldn’t have gone anywhere else to build stadium-ready trailers. The two firms cut a deal last February for Custom to build an initial “food truck you can drive, available for private parties, corporate functions, MLB events, anywhere we can take a truck.”

The first was delivered in July, with four propane-fueled Baker’s Pride deck ovens “to cook our pizzas to Manco standards.”

Custom faces a string of manufacturing challenges with any order, Kyle said.

But from Manco’s perspective the passage of his project from plan to delivery “was seamless,” said Evans.

“As we morph into their larger trucks, we will add wings and tenders,” he said. “If everything in business and life went that easy, it’d be great.”