The Great Food Truck Race: A Unique Food Competition

I believe I talked about the fact that I like watching cooking competition shows before on here right? I’m pretty sure that it was a tag post that was the answer to something you wouldn’t expect from me. I don’t think that you guys have any idea how much of I watch. It’s almost like a clock for me. Saturdays have Iron Chef America reruns on the cooking channel, Sunday nights have The Great Food Truck Race, Best Baker in America just has their season three finale, and I can keep listing things I watched through out the week. I think it’s entirely possible that I watch more food competition shows then I watch anime and live action television shows. How crazy is that? Pretty crazy, probably. Or not. Depends on who you are I suppose. I can probably create an entire blog for food shows, but I don’t have an interest for that.

From all that I’ve watched on the Food Network and Top Chef on Bravo, I think The Great Food Truck Race is most likely the most unique food competition on television. Why? While food quality does matter a lot, the show runs on how much food each competitor can sell and not how good the judges think contestants have cooked their food. There are challenges that increase the amount of money that a food truck has earned during the race, but the main focus of the show is learning how to work a food truck business. Where is the best place a food truck can stop to gather more people, what about a social media presence to get an audience interested in what you’re selling, how do you get people interested in what you are selling, and so many other factors. It’s those sorts of things that make this show so interesting to watch because there is much more thought patterns behind it.

The Great Food Truck Race also have plenty of other factors that make it a more varied experience. For one thing, anybody can join the race. At least, that’s how I feel about it. Everyone from professional cooks to a normal family that wants to try something different are given a food truck from the Food Network to compete in the race. If anyone ends up losing, at least the competing teams had a nice vacation doing something they’ve never done before. The experience would be such a fun one in a life time experience. To add to that variability, every season of The Great Food Truck Race takes place in different cities. This season is centered around cities on the Southern Atlantic coast and last season took place around LA and Nevada. One can watch one season of The Food Truck Race to gather some strategies on how to do it, but it’s possible that none of that will help you because each city has distinct feel and personality.

With that said, there are a least a couple things that never change. For one thing, the show is always going to be focused on food trucks competing to be on the list of trucks that make it to the next city. If that changes, the whole premise and title of The Great Food Truck Race wouldn’t make any sense. Also, Chef Tyler Florence is the host. He’s the guy that announces where the next food truck race location is, calls the challenges, and announces who didn’t make enough money to continue. I really like him, because he’s always reserved and on point. When food trucks aren’t selling as fast or as well as they could be, he tries his best to help as well as he can. Some seasons when the sales were low for everyone, he recruited some local professional help to give each food truck individual advice. I really like Tyler. I honestly don’t think that The Great Food Truck Race could have a better host then him.

Finally, we get to the reason why I wrote this post in the first place, the contestants. I am really bad with names so I am not going to talk specifics. That being said though, I really like how they interact with each other. Yes, this is a competition show and each food truck group wants to outsell the other one. At the same time, I never thought the competitors are ever aggressive towards each other as a whole. I can’t say that about individual groups because there is always going to be that one hundred percent serious group that doesn’t like anyone else. That’s humanity after all. Still, this show could be so heart warming. Last week, one food truck group only had one person due to others freaking out about the competitive nature of the show or having a kidney stone. The very fact that this one food truck worker got help from all of the other trucks during their time of need was absolutely wonderful. That food truck ended up going home because by a margin of one dollar which is sad, but I don’t think it’s possible to feel sad after all of that support. This show is so good sometimes, you know. 

If I had to say what my favorite food network competition shows are, they would be Cut Throat Kitchen, Iron Chef America, and The Great Food Truck Race. Then there is Top Chef which brings it’s own prestige and flair. I don’t think those are ranked in any order, but each one of them brings such uniqueness and intrigue to the food competition scene in their own ways. Maybe The Great Food Truck Race is my favorite. It just has that element of strangeness to it that I can’t help but like while having some intrigue about running a business. I can’t help but admit that some of my blogging ideas have come from watching this show in some way. Is that strange to think about? Probably. Doesn’t matter, The Great Food Truck Race is fun, education, infinitely varied, and full of heart. Can’t recommend it enough to even people that haven’t watched a food competition before.