Branding your food truck: Bro-Ritos, A case study

By Susan October 22, 2016 art, Art Direction, Blog, Brand Visibility, Brand-Interviews, Branding, Design, Events, food truck branding, Innovation, Jersey City and Hoboken, marketing, Smart Business Practices No Comments

A few months back, Jersey City had a fantastic food truck festival. I was so impressed with the design of the food trucks and of course the delectable food, I just had to write about it. Since then I have received quite a few notes, but this story from Bro-Ritos is one I’d like to share.

Marcus writes:

I was just browsing and noticed you did a blog about food truck branding a few months ago. I was drawn to the article as I was reading it because I am a truck owner and I understand the importance of the branding aspects you were speaking of. At the time of your article my truck was quite bare. We had a metal finish with chalkboard writing daily. As you can imagine it was a pain to keep the chalk consistent with the weather elements.

Originally we planned to wrap our truck once it was built out, but we ran into a big issue… we blew the motor! It was a big set back as an engine isn’t cheap and the money we had saved for the wrap had to go toward the replacement, but we made due.

Here are a couple pics from before and after. I liked your article and I hope you like what you see.

Bro-Ritos before food truck branding.

Bro-Ritos after food truck branding design.

It was wonderful of Marcus to share his story, so I decided to ask a few more questions:

Can you share a bit more about who conceptualized the branding and if it is also the design of your print materials?

Thanks for getting back to me. I’m glad you like the design work. I actually conceptualized the branding from start to finish.

A little background on the story of our wrap:

I knew what I wanted design-wise, but could not find anyone local to do it or at that matter to do it at a reasonable rate. I searched and searched through Instagram and found a designer named Rafael that I took a liking too. I finally reached out to him via email and explained what I was looking for. Once he felt confident enough in doing the work we began going through drafts. I tried to have a phone or Skype conversation with him, but he would not take the call. I found out, the reason he avoided the phone is because he lives in Brazil and his English is not fluent. So, this whole design happened via emails and still came out exactly how I wanted it.

Within the design I also wanted to incorporate New Jersey! This is home and I feel like it helps our brand to incorporate where we are from as it is who we are. The silhouette on the driver side of the truck is placed there for people to identify where they are from as they can point and see a lot of the areas we actually serve. The boardwalk is also a staple of New Jersey with the Jersey Shore scene in the summer. The animation of myself, my partner and my cousin, who does a lot with us were the vital pieces to the design. We want our guest to see the truck and be taken back, we also want them to know who we are.

As for print material, that is next in line. Now that we have all of these graphics, the next step will be implementing them across the board through our business. We are looking to have a lot of fun with this business, BRO-RITOS on everything!!

Well Susan, I hope this is enough on the background story.

If you have any other questions, let me know.

Thanks again, Marcus