Regulatory speed bumps slow HK’s new food trucks

HONG KONG — For the 23rd year running, Hong Kong is, in the opinion of the conservative Heritage Foundation, the freest economy in the world. With low taxes, an efficient government and private businesses running the city buses and its spotless subways, this place is a libertarian dream come true. So the story goes.

Many people who live in Hong Kong beg to differ. This has long been a city of tycoons, with a few families holding sway over the supermarkets, drugstores and real estate market, limiting competition and keeping prices high. And, in the past few weeks, four words have further shaken the storyline that this former British colony is a free-market nirvana — the Food Truck Pilot Scheme.

FOOD TRUCK PILOT SCHEME

Hong Kong, a culinary paradise that is arguably the dim sum capital of the world, was, until this month, sorely lacking in something that other financial capitals, such as New York and London, have in spades: Food trucks.

Something had to be done to close the yawning food truck gap. Enter the government, keen to draw in tourists.

After more than a year of preparation, and even cook-offs to pick the lucky few, the food trucks are finally there. Eight for a city of 7.2 million. There are plans for eight more.

The trucks are a sight to behold. Gleaming and new, they are brightly and imaginatively painted, with names such as Ma Ma’s Dumpling and Mein by Maureen. One is emblazoned with a panda that bears a striking resemblance to Po of Kung Fu Panda fame.

And the food is fabulous. The Shanghai barbecue pork bun from the Book Brothers truck melts in your mouth. The “five coloured dumplings” at Ma Ma’s are delicious — an authentic taste of northern China.

Just one ingredient seems to be missing: Customers.

Food trucks in most cities are mobile. They can move from place to place. They are, after all, trucks. In New York, one might hit the lunch crowd in Midtown, then head uptown to Columbia University to catch hungry students in the late afternoon.

In Hong Kong, the government agency that devised the Food Truck Pilot Scheme had a new, bold and innovative idea: Stationary food trucks that do not park on the street. A spokesman for the city’s Tourism Commission explained why in an email: “Since the urban area of Hong Kong is already saturated with traffic, it would not be desirable from the traffic management and road safety angles to allow food trucks to park and operate on public roads. Moreover, as many locations in Hong Kong have already got a number of food establishments, it would thus be desirable to introduce food trucks away from those areas.”

It is all explained in a raft of guidelines. There are seven annexes in all.

Then there is Annex C — “Mandatory Requirements for a Food Truck” — that lists in painstaking detail what each truck must have. Some examples: The kitchen floor space must be at least 65sqf. Each truck must have a potable water tank with a capacity of about 120 litres, and a wastewater tank at least one-and-a-half times that size. The sink must be at least 46cm in length. And so on.

To meet all of those regulations, Hong Kong food trucks must be custom vehicles.

All these rules and regulations have Mr Liu Chun-ho, the owner of Ma Ma’s Dumpling, worried. To meet the stringent requirements, he paid about HK$1 million (S$183,000) for his new Isuzu truck.

On a sunny afternoon recently, his truck was attracting a trickle of customers in a square near the Wong Tai Sin Temple, one of the eight places where food trucks can operate, with the venue maximum set at two food trucks. The trucks must pay a monthly service fee to park. At Wong Tai Sin it is HK$17,000 a month or 15 per cent of the gross revenue, whichever is higher.

Mr Liu illustrates his challenge in units of dumplings. He needs to sell 200 bowls a day, at HK$40 each, just to cover his fixed costs, he said. He is barely making that now, and fears business will plummet once summer comes with the monsoon rains and pounding semi-tropical sun that will keep customers away from the treeless, concrete square.

“The government needs to loosen up,” said Mr Liu, 43. He has been to Thailand and Japan, and in those places, “you can set up shop anywhere — on the roads, on the streets”.

The result is that small-business entrepreneurs, the mainstays of food trucks in other countries, find it forbidding to enter the market in Hong Kong. One truck is owned by a United States company with a fleet of trucks in California, another by the heiress to a local noodle chain, which also won the rights to operate one of the next eight food trucks set to go into operation.

Despite these problems, Hong Kong’s government has rolled out the programme to great fanfare.

There has been an endless stream of news releases, and the city has hired a public relations firm to drum up interest. Mr Liu had just finished giving an interview to two reporters from the Chinese Communist Party’s flagship People’s Daily newspaper. There is even a phone app, Hong Kong Food Truck, that shows which trucks are at which of the eight designated locations.

Mr Liu hopes, perhaps against hope, that he will be able to make more money at a venue his truck will occupy in the future — a patch of landfill jutting out into Victoria Harbour called Golden Bauhinia Square.

To get there, pedestrians must take a zigzag of narrow paths through a giant construction project. The square, whose main attraction is a golden statue of a bauhinia flower, an emblem of the city, is also frequented by buses filled with tourists from mainland China.

There, on a weekday afternoon, four employees of Book Brothers waited for customers to buy their delicious barbecue pork sandwiches, which come with a Hong Kong flag planted in the bun. Over a 15-minute stretch, they had one sale.

One woman from mainland China baulked at the price, HK$38, for the small sandwich, saying she thought that was the price for three. That is a problem, said one of the workers, Ms Chen Qiuling, who said two-thirds of their customers are from China.

The workers at Book Brothers hope that their next location, closer to the city’s central business district, will be busier.

And if they cannot sell their pork buns, they could always try something else, right? After all, that is what capitalism is all about.

Not so fast — please refer to Answer No 8 of the government’s “Frequently Asked Questions: Application of the Food Truck Pilot Scheme (Pilot Scheme)”.

“No alteration of the signature dish proposed by the applicant in the application form will be allowed after the submission of Application and throughout the Scheme,” it says. “If the operator wishes to change dishes other than the signature dish, he should obtain prior written approval from the Venues and the Food and Environmental Hygiene Department.” THE NEW YORK TIMES