One of the providers at the stadium is a business called Farmtruk, which bills itself as “farm to table comfort food,” with an emphasis on fresh, local, free-range ingredients. Samantha “Sam” Mitchell, the owner, has been running a food truck for seven years, “bouncing all around town” in St. Louis, hitting about 200 events a year. One of those events in 2019 was an away-game watch party for the St. Louis Blues outside their stadium, during their run to the Stanley Cup championship.
“The Blues invited food trucks to their watch parties and we just crushed it,” said Mitchell. That led to the Blues offering a concession stand inside their stadium to Farmtruk, which the company has operated the past four hockey seasons.
When CityPark started looking around for providers for its stadium food offerings, Mitchell said CityPark officials “scouted” Farmtruk during hockey season and offered them a spot. With the hockey-stand background Mitchell and Farmtruk are perhaps the most-experienced provider at CityPark, since she knows the difference between a truck event and a game very well.
“It’s all about adapting the business, with multiple registers and different line setups,” Mitchell said. Farmtruk, which actually operates two stands inside CityPark (one is smaller and focuses on mac and cheese), is one of the 10 providers who are part of the order-ahead service on the stadium app, a double-edged sword that Mitchell had to learn to deal with.
Though Mitchell said that dealing with the Covid pandemic did help Farmtruk in one perspective (“we had a lot of practice setting up a mobile ordering system for the truck”), she added that there is nothing in the food truck world that can compare to the flood of orders coming in pregame and just before halftime.
“The orders come in fast and you have to turn the food around quickly,” Mitchell said. Even with parameters put in place for the stadium (“a limited menu is the key”) there is still a juggling act that Mitchell is learning to perfect, balancing the app orders with those coming from fans just walking up to the stands.
“As soon as the gates open, I’ve got 40 burgers going all at once,” said Mitchell, whose stand has one register area for walk-up customers and another for those who have pre-ordered through the app. And the latter, she said, continues to grow each game as more fans learn and adopt the service.
“The first game we were on the app, it was like, ‘OK, where are you guys,’ ” Mitchell said. “The next game, mobile doubled my sales.”
While Mitchell admits that the twin crushes before gametime and before halftime “sometimes cause us to break the Internet,” she welcomes the addition of the app-based orders. “It’s really impressive, the amount of volume we get through the app,” she said.
Once a sous chef for about seven years, Mitchell said she started the food truck “to take a break” but now is happy about being back in the middle of something frantic that is also profitable.
“When we were setting up the idea [for CityPark] we went to Nashville and watched a game there to get a feel for it, and it brought chills because the fans were so intense,” Mitchell said. Now, that energy is evident at CityPark, where getting good food is clearly part of the game-day experience.
“It’s a blast because people are so excited to be here, as they swoop by and get their food on the way to their seats,” Mitchell said. “It feels like we’re setting the bar for something.”
And for Farmtruk, it’s more than just fun.
“Financially, the stadium stands are bread and butter,” said Mitchell, who estimates the stand operations will add an additional 25 percent of revenue to the Farmtruk bottom line.
“It’s going to be a good year for Farmtruk,” Mitchell said.
Next: Part 5: Provider close-up: Balkan Treat Box
This post is one part of our seven-part report on the concessions operations at St. Louis City SC’s CityPark. To go to the start of the report, click this link. You can also download a PDF of the full report, with more photos.
