Fabricating food trucks

It’s not too often that a 70-year-old shop is attached to a hip trend, but that’s the life of a metal fabricator: Make brackets one day and build a vehicle that will catch the eye of thousands the next day.

Buffalo OutFront Metalworks, located on the east side of Buffalo, N.Y., has come a long way over the last three years. In 2012 it was just a tired job shop with a five-man crew that was creeping along on a few projects and a handful of regular customers. Then a Canadian entrepreneur recognized an opportunity in the fall of that year and made some key investments in personnel and fabricating technology.

Today the company has approximately 40 employees, and after a merger in 2014 it has latched on to a hot business segment—food truck fabrication (see Figure 1). Buffalo OutFront reports that the food truck segment represents about half of the shop’s new business and accounts for about half of the company’s sales revenues in 2015, which the company declined to reveal.

In searching for a metal fabricating identity, Buffalo OutFront found that it had a taste for fabricating food trucks.

Building up Buffalo

Buffalo Metal Fabricating Corp. was like other older metal fabricating shops in the U.S. in 2012. It had failed to keep up with new technology and instead relied on the skill of its workers to deliver quality fabrications that were typically one or few of a kind and weren’t needed in a matter of hours. It was getting by as modern manufacturing raced by them.

Around the same time, Canadian Tony Van Es was looking to establish a manufacturing presence in the U.S. He was no stranger to metal fabricating, having patented a way to build garden shelters that can be quickly assembled and disassembled after the selling season is over. Van Es built a successful business in Canada with that idea, and those temporary buildings can be found at home improvement stores across Canada. Van Es’ company, All Cover Portable Systems, located in Beamsville, Ont., has expanded to include manufacturing of retail displays and cart corrals; design, build, and installation of garden centers; and storage and delivery of the temporary structures that it makes. The public knows the company as OutFront Portable Solutions.

In fall 2012 New York state officials formally welcomed the creation of Buffalo OutFront Metalworks LP with an announcement that the business would receive $450,000 in tax credits. Van Es pledged to invest $2 million in the real estate acquisition, building renovation, and technology acquisition. Buffalo Metal Fabricating was laid to rest.

Around this time, Thomas Shiah was brought onboard to assist in project management. Shiah had graduated from Syracuse University with a bachelor’s degree in landscape architecture in 2010—in the midst of one of the worst economic periods in U.S. history—so he didn’t really have the opportunity to find a local job that exactly matched his collegiate studies. Instead he became a draftsman for Buffalo-based Klein Steel Service Inc., where he was introduced to CNC fabricating equipment, part design, and production scheduling. He may not have known it at the time, but he had stumbled upon a career path. He was looking to expand upon that at Buffalo OutFront.

“The day that I got hired is the day that the company got a large, multimillion-dollar contract. It was for architectural backpans, which are insulated panels that go behind the glazing for skyscrapers,” Shiah said. “The job was for 10,000 units, so we needed a machine to produce the galvanized panel flat patterns.”

That day Buffalo OutFront entered the world of modern fabricating. It decided to buy a laser cutting machine.

Figure 1
These food trucks are examples of some of the work coming from Buffalo OutFront Metalworks.

Soon afterward an LVD Orion 3015 4-kW laser center with an automated load and unload system was installed. The CO₂ laser can cut up to 1-in. steel and 0.625-in. stainless steel.

The high number of parts coming off the laser machine, especially when it was operating in lights-out mode when no one was in the shop, forced the shop to upgrade its bending capabilities as well. It now has four CNC press brakes, with the largest being 350 tons and having a 16-ft. bed. One of the press brakes is from LVD’s Easy-Form^® series that has advanced features such as automatic bend correction and graphic control displays that simplify programming.

The shop also added a 5-axis OMAX^® waterjet, new welding equipment, new software design tools, and a renovated paint area. The “old iron,” as Shiah called it, was removed, and new possibilities replaced it.

Of course, these moves required a flexible approach from the shop’s personnel.

“When I came in, I told them, ‘You are going to need someone to run the laser,’” Shiah said. “I was designing parts already. I was estimating. I was doing everything.”

From Flexibility to Food Trucks

That flexibility served Buffalo OutFront well in the early days, according to Shiah. The company needed to build up its clientele and generate cash flow, and the best way to do that was to do everything.

For example, even though it has a lot of machine tools typically associated with precision fabricating, the shop tackles a lot of structural weldment projects as well. The facility has a high bay in the back and has cranes to move the large pieces. Skilled workers enable the shop to process jobs involving structural tube, thick plate, and machined assemblies quickly and professionally.

On the other end of the spectrum, Buffalo OutFront worked with a customer that required specialty stainless steel work for food service stations found at grocery stores (see Figure 2). The customer was a whiz with the woodworking, but lacked the metal fabricating expertise.

“We have gotten good at being flexible,” Shiah said. “We are good at making whatever it is that you need. We have pursued so much diversity in order to just get work.

“We have gone through a lot of people to find the right team,” he added. “So now we have the right group that can do a lot of different work that comes from all different directions.”

Figure 2
After an acquisition of a former customer, Buffalo OutFront Metalworks is now fabricating these types of food self-service stations found in grocery stores.

As Buffalo OutFront and its customer, Custom Built Displays, worked with each other, they began to learn more about each other’s businesses. Buffalo OutFront’s story was pretty simple: It wanted metal fabricating work and had the capacity to do it. Custom Built Displays, on the other hand, was at a potential turning point: It needed more manufacturing space to take on more work, and it lacked the metalworking skills that many of its customers were requiring on projects.

So in the fall of 2014, Buffalo OutFront purchased its former customer. That’s when the metal fabricator had the real opportunity to jump into the food truck business.

Keeping on Truckin’

The food truck scene that has grabbed headlines—and taste buds—all over the U.S. for the past several years was not lost on western New York. Buffalo has its own mobile food movement, and one of the earliest pioneers was the Lloyd Taco Truck (which you can track via whereslloyd.com). Custom Built Displays made the first taco truck back in 2010.

“The other restaurants in town are now seeing a need to be involved in that end of the business, but they also see that these trucks are good for catering,” Shiah said.

When visitors walk into the company’s 50,000-sq.-ft. fabricating facility today, they might notice two garage doors on both sides of the building. That is the perfect entry and exit points for the food trucks.

On the busiest of days, the shop floor might have seven trucks in various states of creation. The truck closest to the entry door is likely to have two individuals ripping out the old interior of the used vehicle’s rear compartment, making way for the mobile kitchen. The truck closest to the exit door is being checked one final time, ensuring all the gas and electrical hookups work. In between, trucks are in various states of completion.

“Almost every truck is custom, like everything we do,” Shiah said.

As with any job shop, Buffalo OutFront sought to find efficiencies as it embraced its role of supporting the region’s mobile culinary revolution. The work was not the only thing that was varied. The fabricator was bringing together two workforces: its own talented metalworkers and the newly acquired company’s craftsmen who could handle electrical, gas, plumbing, and whatever other work might be needed. They talked differently and were not used to working with each other. The front office also had to adapt to the new terminology of food truck manufacturing.

One of the first lessons everyone learned is that by limiting choices for customers they could begin to generate repetitive orders for the stainless steel countertops, cabinets, and other kitchen items found in all of these trucks. This investigatory process begins with one question: What kind of components does the customer want in the truck? The number of cooking devices, such as hot plates, grills, and steam wells, drives the amount of amperage that is needed and, in turn, determines the size of the required generator, the most expensive option on the food trucks.

After deciding where the cooking devices go in the footprint of the mobile kitchen area, the designer then starts filling in the box (see Figure 3), according to Shiah. Counter space is always at a premium, so it’s usually used to fill open areas along the walls.

Figure 3
As this photo illustrates, the interior of a kitchen on a food truck is not large. Cooking devices and food storage needs go a long way in determining just how much space is left for counters in a mobile kitchen.

Now job orders that come from the front office are detailed in what is needed to create the correctly named part. For example, if a request for a cold pan is sent out to the shop floor, the fabricators know what needs to happen. The flat pattern is laser-cut, bent on the press brake, welded up, polished, dropped into the countertop, insulated, and covered with a galvanized shell, all concealed under the countertop.

The shop also has reorganized its layout “four or five” times, Shiah said. The goal is to minimize excessive material handling. The fabricating machinery is close to areas where the parts are needed, so flow is logical and delivery is easy.

“You learn from the people on the shop floor that despite having complete customer parts and new things on the floor every day, we make it feel like the same thing,” Shiah said.

Buffalo OutFront is also developing a reputation for its food-grade work. Customers are aware that the shop can deliver topnotch finishes on the stainless steel products and welds that are clean and have no porosity.

The company’s designers are also becoming more familiar with the real challenges of operating a food truck. Call it the not-so-glamorous side of the mobile kitchen business.

“If you understand how assemblies can be made so they can be cleaned, that’s a talent that not a lot of fabricators have,” Shiah said. “So we design products for food manufacturers that can be disassembled, cleaned, and put back together every time. That’s another niche.”

The shop that was looking for an identity has seemed to have found one, but Shiah said that it’s still a work-in-process. The food trucks are a great business and represent a significant growth area for the fabricating business, but it’s not about to turn down jobs related to the heat exchanger industry. That’s not what job shops do.

“We are truly a job shop,” he said. “We just do a lot of things better than a lot of other job shops.”