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The Second Helping Foodtruck is bringing free healthy fresh food to places all around the Toledo area.
Run by the Cherry Street Mission’s Workforce Development program, the food truck not only provides meals to the community but provides jobs and a training program too.
“Our Workforce Development program trains people for job skills and then we try to help them get jobs. In the case of the food truck, all of the students who enter the program take a six-week class, three days a week. Once they graduate, they can become employees on the food truck,” said Heather Williams, food truck manager.
About the classes
Since March of 2024, when Williams hopped on board, there have been eight classes and a total of 57 graduates of the program. To participate in the program, you have to be 21-years-old and meet income requirements.
“The students have to meet income eligibility requirements, so they have to have a certain level of income. There are income guidelines for the class because the class is funded through grants,” Williams said.
When in the program, you speak to professionals, learn about advertising, cooking and the guidelines to owning and operating your own food truck.
“We spend a lot of time focusing on the Lucas County guidelines to open a food truck, going over the application, walking them through the process of that… ProMedica offers some financial information. We take them to the small business area over at the Main Library. They work on business plans, they learn about advertising, they learn about basic cooking skills. They learn about multiplying recipes out for large quantities of people,” Williams said. “They learn about how everything isn’t going to go smoothly and there’s always going to be chaos and that owning your own business is the hardest you’ll ever work. Then we give them the opportunity to come back and work on the truck.”
While you don’t need to work for the food truck after taking the program, Williams finds that many love the people; some have even been working on the truck for over two years.
“A lot of people feel the camaraderie and they really build a sense of community in the class, working together,” Williams said. “A lot of them will just come back and work one or two shifts a month or whatever works into their schedule.”
Since the program started, multiple students have gone on to open their own food trucks.
“I know there are two sisters that just reached out to me the other day wanting to have me come over and check out their truck, but I do know that there are two others that have been working on getting licensed. One had a truck before they even took the class. It was kind of like they wanted to take the class to learn more,” Williams said.
About the food truck
Since the Second Helping Food Truck’s first priority is community, the meals are free, but you are welcome to leave a donation.
“We do accept cash donations and we accept credit card donations, but no matter what, all the food’s always free. 100% of any money that we get goes back into the food truck, operating the food truck, paying the employees, all those kinds of things,” Williams said.
As the food truck is run by the Cherry Street Mission, many of the food items incorporate cherries into the recipe.
“90% of the recipes have some sort of a cherry aspect to them… We feature our Cherry Street pasta salad, which is a spin on a traditional pasta salad. It has dried cherries, feta, red onions and tomatoes. Then it has a garlic expression dressing and it is served over a bed of lettuce and you can get that with roasted turkey or without roasted turkey, because we try to be very cognizant of having vegetarian and vegan meals,” Williams said.
The food truck goes to many different local events and hosts weekly outings, all of which you can find on its website or social media pages.
“We go over to the [ProMedica Ebeid Institute]. We were doing a Warm-up Wednesday where we would take soup over to the Market on the Green to hand out soup. Then we would go around to the library and hand out soup. We partner with Mercy and ProMedica with a lot of their back-to-school backpack events or back-to-school haircut events. We are constantly looking for new partnerships and new places to go,” Williams said.
You are also able to request the food truck to come to events through a form on its website, but they do have one rule when it comes to events.
“You just fill out the event request form and it asks for basic information about different things. One of the questions is, ‘Is there other food going to be offered?’ The reason we ask that is we do not go to other events where there are going to be other food trucks,” Williams said. “The reason being is our food is free and our mission is to help people become entrepreneurs and better themselves. We don’t find it to be fair if we’re gonna go and be like, ‘our food’s free’ while this person’s charging money, when they are trying to better themselves and be an entrepreneur; we don’t want to interfere with that in any way, shape or form.”
As the food truck’s busy season is just now getting going, they are already expected to give out more meals than they did last year.
“Last year we did right around 10,000 meals. This year, we have already, as of the beginning of May, done over 5,800. So we’re already well on our way since that was already the really slow time,” Williams said.
Williams, who has had her own food truck in the past, finds that working with the Second Helping Food Truck is “rewarding.”
“I have a worker on the food truck who has been through the system. He was in foster care and he has been incarcerated, and really, his life has turned around. Watching him and the pleasure that he gets from giving back to the community is really, truly rewarding. He takes it seriously and he really enjoys it. Just seeing people become even more amazing versions of themselves is really what’s cool,” Williams said.
For more information the food truck’s schedule and the event request form, go to Cherry Street Mission online.
