Vancouver will soon have more than twice as many vendors of diverse street food thanks to the City of Vancouver’s approval of 19 new vendor licences.
More than 100 entrepreneurs applied to get one of the new licences and mayor Gregor Robertson announced the winning applicants April 4.
A panel of food industry insiders, such as chefs Vikram Vij and Karen Barnaby, selected the winners.
The food vendor program launched last year when city council approved 17 applications from entrepreneurs who wanted to sell exotic food, such as Mexican, Indian and Middle Eastern cuisine.
The program is separate from the one that oversees the dozens of hotdog vendors in Vancouver.
The program is also likely to expand, given that city council voted in January to increase the number of carts by 60 additional sites over the next four years.
“It’s exciting,” Tacofino co-owner Kaeli Robinsong told Business in Vancouver after she and husband, Jason Sussman, won their bid to sell tacos near Davie and Denman streets.
“Our tacos are totally inspired by our travels. Our Baja taco is modelled after one that we found a woman making on the beach in Mexico. She was in a little surf town and she showed us how to make them.”
Robinsong and Sussman invested $60,000 two years ago to equip a truck and get storage space so they could sell tacos out of their truck in a Tofino parking lot.
Robinsong said they had to stop doing that in November when Tofino’s village council told them that the municipality had no law permitting mobile food vending.
But instead of simply moving that truck to Vancouver, the duo spent about $25,000 to buy a new, smaller truck for the English Bay location.
They still hope Tofino council will have a change of heart and let them sell their tacos in the West Coast resort village.