The Heritage Food Truck Catering business is both a player and a coach. As a player, it is a free-standing business serving private and corporate customers like any other food truck catering business. As a coach, Heritage Food Truck Catering acts as a role-model for other food trucks or catering businesses in setting up the infrastructure required by other businesses to connect to local agriculture, promote locally-sourced food or measure the nutritional impact of better food on local populations.
A CHEF, A DOCTOR AND A CONSULTANT CLIMB INTO A FOOD TRUCK
Heritage Food Truck Catering is managed by three people of wildly different backgrounds.
Chef Lorena grew up in Brazil, surrendered by orchards and gardens. The orchard had lime, orange, peach and mango trees. Her grandmother grew all varieties of vegetables that went directly from her garden to the family table.
As a teenager in a private school founded by nuns from Italy, she discovered the joy of cooking Italian recipes. She also cooked at her friends’ gatherings. Every year, she made a point of visiting her grandma in Southern Brazil. Today she still remembers her grandma’s recipes and still hears her grandma’s “Veneto” dialect from Northern Italy, the official language of Italian Immigrants in Southern Brazil. In spite of having little time available in college, she continued cooking for her sister and herself.
Once in the United States, Chef Lorena went to culinary school while practicing her craft at parties, weddings, birthdays and dinner dances. She quickly developed a knack for various Cuisines of the world, and realized she loves the multi cultural experience cooking can provide.
Today, Chef Lorena is proud to offer a multi-cultural cuisine with a twist of her Brazilian heritage. She will be happy to accommodate your specific requests, but will also suggest delicious meals that will make your events an unforgettable experience for your guests.
Health expert Doctor Gary (Gary Epler) is an internationally-known thought leader on health and nutrition. He is affiliated with both Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the Harvard Medical School and is particularly known for having uncovered a rare lung disease called BOOP (acronym for a complex name we will spare you here). He has written four health books in the critically-acclaimed “You’re the Boss” series about people taking charge of their health. He now devotes his time and passion to advocating for better food as a driver of biological health. He has developed an easy-to-understand view of nutrition that reduces inflammation in the human body through the use of four families of ingredients, including the use of an “eat the rainbow” approach that elegantly marries to the locally-sourced philosophy of Heritage Food Truck Catering.
CEO Francis (Francis Gouillart) is neither a chef, nor a health expert (just call him Francis). His role as the humble CEO of the venture is to help assemble the ecosystem of players required to make Heritage Food Truck Catering a success, constantly optimizing the interactions between customers, staff, suppliers, and regulators (not to mention arbitrating between Chef Lorena’s desire for more butter and salt and Dr. Gary’s desire to eradicate those two ingredients from the face of the earth). Heritage Food Truck Catering and its sister company Stock Pot Malden are Francis’ secret garden and the field of experimentation for his theory of ecosystem co-creation. Author of several books and articles, he is also an internationally recognized consultant working with the management of large corporations struggling with complex ecosystem issues, including the need to re-connect agriculture, food and health globally.
WHERE WE COME FROM…HERITAGE FOOD TRUCK CATERING WAS BORN OUT OF THE STOCK POT MALDEN SHARED KITCHEN
In 2014, a small group of investors started a shared kitchen commissary called Stock Pot Malden, with the intent of enabling the development of food entrepreneurs by giving them access to an affordable kitchen. Today, we are happy to report that our shared kitchen is a success. We have opened a second building, are close to 100% capacity, are profitable and are looking at expanding further to accommodate the growth of our existing member-tenants, while developing new locations.
We are now ready to move to a second phase in our strategy, which involves connecting the kitchen infrastructure we provide to local agriculture and local health. Today, our food entrepreneurs are a representation of the larger food industry in that they find it difficult to use local produce in their food, given the economic and logistical challenges involved. While many are attentive to providing “clean food”, we also want to increase the contribution of our food to local population health.
In order to make the connection between food production, local sourcing and population health to happen, the investors of Stock Pot Malden decided in 2019 to launch their own company-owned food truck, to role-model how this connection can be successfully built. This is how the Heritage Food Truck Catering business was born.