‘Great Food Truck Race’ hits the beach in Season 15 of Food Net series
With summer upon us, “The Great Food Truck Race” takes on a beach theme as it spends all of its 15th season on the Southern California coast.
Premiering Sunday, June 5, on Food Network and discovery+, the new round of eight episodes finds host and Golden State native Tyler Florence tasking nine teams of aspiring food truck owners with challenges that will test their cooking skills, marketing savvy and salesmanship.
So they’ll stop in locales such as Laguna Beach for a spicy hot pepper challenge; Venice Beach, for a hemp-based menu challenge and a visit from chef Antonia Lofaso; Long Beach, for a selling competition at the Grand Prix of Long Beach; and San Diego for a head-to-head finale in which the winner is awarded a $50,000 grand prize.
One of Florence’s favorite stops this season – and one that was a big surprise to him – was at Glamis Dunes in the desert due east of San Diego, where Mexi-cali cuisine is big and riding dune buggies is the sport of choice.
“There’s like 100,000 people out in these wild hills of this big, massive desert formation,” he explains, “and they just race these super-expensive dune buggies all weekend. And ... I got a chance to drive one of these super-expensive off-road vehicles out through the sands, so that was a really, really good time. And some of these smaller little towns that we roll into are always like the biggest shows, the biggest stories. And so we just had great turnout.”
In Sunday’s season opener, the competition kicks off in Laguna Beach, where the teams see their food trucks for the first time and are challenged with creating a dish from spicy hot peppers. Alliances are formed over the three rounds and one truck will be sent home, a theme that will be repeated each episode until the winner is crowned in the San Diego finale.
But in Florence’s view, there are no losers here as each of the competitors comes away with knowledge of what it takes to be successful in this industry.
“They come out of this with some real hard, honed skills on how to survive,” the Bay Area-based chef and restaurateur says. “So food quality and marketing and competition and teamwork and leadership and all these kind of things that scale up to the biggest businesses in the world start out with a food truck. And so if you can make this successful, you can make anything successful.”