Eat up: Food
truck giving out free tacos
Painted bright colors, it cruises about town
By Toni Fitzgerald
Jun 24, 2010
You're walking home from work and feeling a bit hungry. You spot a truck across the street, green with yellow-painted windows and decorated with festive flowers, your basic food truck, one of those trendy traveling restaurants that serve up authentic ethnic cuisine on city streets virtually any time of day.
You place your order but when you go to pay the server shakes his head and points to the sign outside: "Free tacos."
Yes, it's a food truck, but it's really an alternative media stunt to promote the new mini street tacos being introduced by Qdoba, the chain of Mexican grills.
The chain has been sending the truck around Seattle, handing out free mini tacos to lure people into visiting its restaurants.
The stunt works on a number of levels. For one, it plays into a big trend in which restaurants send out food trucks to promote themselves, reaching customers who might not otherwise learn of them.
It makes the chain seem very with it.
"We'd seen a spark of street food becoming more popular in Seattle, such as taco trucks and ice cream companies," says Jamie Hall, marketing coordinator for Beyond Traditional (formerly GoMobile), which helped coordinate the event. "Mini street taco was created and inspired by Mexican street vendor culture, so we wanted to allow people to have the experience of trying the product in its element."
The free taco truck itself is an overhauled former food delivery vehicle whose fixtures, plumbing and flooring were replaced to allow for on-location cooking. Beyond Traditional hand-painted the entire exterior of the truck to look like the brightly colored street food trucks that cruise the streets of Seattle for burger, Thai, Japanese and other restaurants.
Qdoba's has been traveling around the city on Friday and Saturday nights for several weeks. A street team of four people hand out coupons and silicone bracelets emblazoned with the URL of a mini street taco microsite, while inside a crew cooks up tacos for the crowds gathering around the vehicle.
The mini-taco giveaways typically last two to three hours, during which more than 400 tacos might be handed out.
"We designed this campaign to be rather spontaneous in that each event is announced to the public on Facebook and Twitter only days before the free tacos start flowing," Hall says.
Each meal consists of three tacos, which usually sell for $4.99 a meal at the restaurant, and Qdoba has handed out more than 2,000 freebies so far, with events slated to continue through July.
The stunt works by getting people to sample the product, but it also engages them on a longer-term basis by getting them to sign up for Twitter and Facebook alerts about the events.
The campaign has already created a fair bit of media buzz. The truck was recently featured on "New Day Northwest," a local talk show where 200 mini taco meals were served.
"We’re nearing 1,000 social media fans that follow the truck around Seattle and have been written about in the Seattle Weekly, City Search and numerous food blogs, both in Seattle and nationally," Hall says.
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