Our sister paper, SF Weekly asks: How do you know when street food is hot? When Whole Foods takes notice.
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SFoodie editor John Birdsall reports that Whole Foods has “approached a handful of local street-food vendors in hopes of developing a line of products to sell at area stores.”
They are “to develop a line of foods called Street Eats to sell either from grab-and-go perishable fridge cases, or as nonperishable, shelf-stable items, in some of the 30 Whole Foods stores in Northern California.”
No word yet on whether Southern California Whole Foods will be doing the same.
Though I have reservations that this would even work, it still makes more sense than recent news reports that Burger King is selling its fries in grocer's freezers. I think Al Roker got it right when he glibly said (and I'm paraphrasing here), “Yeah, because there aren't Burger Kings everywhere.”
So, how do I know we've reached high-end food truck saturation? It's when I run into one without trying (even as there are reports new-age food trucks fizzling and dying).
In this case, it was SeaBirds that I spotted, which is the elusive organic vegetarian food truck you've probably not heard much about. It was parked in front of Irvine City Hall on a day I happen to be there this week. Did I partake? Sadly, no. I had meat consumption on my mind at the time.
But an organic veggie street food truck that sources from local growers? This sounds like it might be a match made in Whole Foods heaven.
Before becoming an award-winning restaurant critic for OC Weekly in 2007, Edwin Goei went by the alias “elmomonster” on his blog Monster Munching, in which he once wrote a whole review in haiku.