Editor’s note: This is the first in a series of three stories about rural innovation in Iowa.
Using food carts to spur entrepreneurship in food preparation dates back to 2015 when Lisa Bates, assistant director for community and economic development at Iowa State University Extension and Outreach, and a colleague were working with small grocers in rural Iowa – and they noticed many grocers did not have fresh fruits and vegetables.
The grocers were hampered by the costs and lack of connections with local food growers. Also, turnover was a problem; the produce was slower to sell, she said.
Enter ISU’s mobile fruit and vegetable processing carts. The university currently has three food carts that are available for rent to organizations and businesses around the state.
“What if they could have an option to do a little bit of light processing in their store without having to spend all the infrastructure money on a full-size kitchen, because that’s extremely expensive,” Bates said. “We’re looking at something that’s a little bit easier to start up, add a little bit of value to that produce and use produce that might turn into other things, such as salsas or you could do grab-and-goes and cut up a large melon.”
Bates’ colleague Courtney Long, food systems program manager with ISU Extension and Outreach, and director of the Agricultural Marketing Resource Center, said the team is working with counties to house the carts and lease them out to make them more accessible across different regions.
“However, we are still determining the process and price based on use and timeframe,” Long said. “We anticipate that county offices that house the carts will be responsible for the rent agreements.” She said they hope to confirm details of those agreements this fall.
The mobile processing cart is a stand-alone unit that needs to be transported to food safe locations for use, according to a report prepared by Long, Bates and others at ISU.
“The cart was intended to fulfill a need for small businesses to process raw products into value-added products in spaces that didn’t have a certified kitchen nor the funding to build out a certified kitchen,” according to the report.
Each food cart has an area to prep and process food; users can also package foods and set up a space for samples, Bates said.
The carts also have a “food waste shoot” that connects into the trash area, Long said. Each cart has wings so it can be “elongated for the right flow of product,” she said.
The carts have a Hobart food processor that comes with them, along with some cutlery that sit on magnetic strips on the back, organizers said.
“So you can do different kinds of products with different kinds of cutting and dicing and shredding,” Bates said. “Really, we’re looking at fresh fruits and vegetables. We can also do cut cheeses there as well.”
Food cart designers and organizers small businesses to think how they might use in addition to helping counties with a business model for using the carts, Bates said.
“Small businesses could do some product testing so they don’t have to do large amounts if they wanted to start doing some recipe testing, some trials and getting their product a little bit more refined before going up to a larger scale,” Bates said.
Bates also said organizers are leaning on the “education side of extension,” such as 4-H, to think about how a county office might engage with youths.
“Kids and adults can really engage across extension, so that we’ll be able to both think about kids and exposing them to different fruits and vegetables and products and recipes,” she said. “But also it can be an adult education to help expand that view of how to use fresh fruits and vegetables in the state as well.”
The first experimental food cart was designed and built in 2021, with partnership from the Iowa State Food Safety team, graduate students and Community Economic Development and Farm, Food, and Enterprise Development Extension, the report said. Over the course of two years, the cart was built and tested in event spaces, businesses and schools.
Bates said the food carts team has received numerous grants over the years to allow for research, food safety, development, materials, fabricating, equipment purchases and development of standard operating procedures and testing. The full cost for a single cart can be up to $15,000 depending on the required specialized equipment for fruit and vegetable processing, she said.
The Iowa Farmers Union recently used a food cart at the Iowa State Fair to make samples of fresh salsa, said Tommy Hexter, the union’s policy director.
“We asked Iowa State, ‘Hey, can we rent the cart out for a day to process tomatoes, onions, jalapenos, peppers, garlic and turn it into salsa for fair-goers?’” Hexter said.
Hexter said the union’s members brought the cart into the fairgrounds on a trailer and in total gave out 2,200 samples of chips and salsa, using 120 pounds of tomatoes.
The point of giving out samples was to demonstrate that “locally grown food is bountiful here, and that it tastes really good, and that you can turn it into things other than just fresh produce,” he said.
He said the cart helps Iowa farms by turning their produce into something else value-added, like salsa, jams, jellies or pickles.
“There’s so many things that you can make when you start processing local produce with a processing cart,” he said. “I think this idea of having a processing cart that’s shareable and that can be transported between farms opens the door for a lot of innovation and new products and economic development for these farms to go into a whole new line of business, so that Iowans can have access to new products, but also that these farmers have markets that go all the way through the winter when they’re not pulling produce out of the ground.”