WHEELS FOR MEALS
Local man builds and designs custom food trucks
Life dealt Deion Estrada a lemon, but he responded by making more than just lemonade — choosing to build the whole stand instead.
Estrada’s lemon came in the form of a food truck he ordered to be custom-built in Atlanta in 2015. He was attempting to enter the mobile restaurant industry, with plans to sell California-style pastrami and cheeseburgers out of a truck named after his late father’s nickname, Big Shorty.
But shoddy craftsmanship and months of delays in the building process gave Estrada a glimpse of the difficulty in getting these mobile businesses up and running, and the launch of Big Shorty’s food truck was delayed by months.
“It was a very painful process,” Estrada said. “And when I got it, it was basically thrown together, so I basically rebuilt the truck from scratch when I got it here (to Oklahoma City).”
Estrada’s rebuild turned the lemon of a food truck into the lemonade he thought he desired. But he wasn’t the only one with truck problems in need of a good mechanic who understood the needs of “truckies,” as Estrada fondly calls fellow food truck operators.
“Once everybody realized, ‘Hey Deion can work on food trucks,’ I got so busy I couldn’t even work on my food truck,” he said.
This is when Estrada decided to open D&D Custom Built Food Trucks, a full shop dedicated to making and repairing food trucks, at 245 NW 94. He’d moved past making lemonade into the next phase.
“I made the whole stand,” Estrada said, extending his metaphor. “That’s what I like to say.”
An expert in Oklahoma City
Food trucks have caught on in central Oklahoma and around the country, with their popularity rising in recent years. Estrada’s reputation has grown in that same time, and he now has more than 40 trucks under his belt that he’s either repaired or custombuilt since 2015.
Ben Hornbacher is a current client who is on the verge of debuting his food truck, Whole Latte Pie. The truck will serve, as the name suggests, pies and specialty coffee.
Hornbacher met with Estrada more than a year ago about the possibility of building the truck. The two began to develop the realistic plans for what the truck needed.
“I’ll let the customer tell me what they want, and then I tell them what they really need,” Estrada said. “You can’t put everything into a food truck that you can a 3,000-square-foot kitchen.”
In this case, Whole Latte Pie doesn’t require the same kind of kitchen things as most, but the pair realized there would need to be a lot of power to run the necessary refrigeration of the pies and to operate an espresso machine.
“Deion brings a lot of expertise and a lot of excellence, but he also brings a lot of reality with that,” Hornbacher said. “Collaborating with Deion and saying what are our needs, and what are the nice-to-haves ... he brings a lot of value to the truck-building process.”
Born to build
Estrada recently sold his Big Shorty’s truck in order to work full time with D&D Custom Built Food Trucks. The transition was bittersweet, since the truck was named for his late father, but there are aspects of the real Big Shorty present in the new business and the love and support comes from other family members.
“Growing up, my father was a mechanic, so I watched him,” Estrada said. “I’ve been around it, I’m great with my hands and it’s truly a blessing to do something I love.
“I did that truck for him, and now my mom is my biggest fan beside my wife because she likes to see the progression, seeing me get better and better and more people coming to me,” Estrada said.
With dozens of trucks built, and more in progress, Estrada’s business is showing measurable success. Prices range from $30,000 to $125,000, depending on how extensive the work, but at the end of the day, Estrada’s still a former truckie who loves seeing others in the business get their operations rolling.
“I like the fact that I can sit down with somebody and when they leave I’ve made their dreams come true,” Estrada said. “They’re not just a customer, they’re part of my family now.”