If you have a question about a food truck in Vermont, Max and Louie Orleans are the guys to ask. Since 2022, the twin brothers have run the South End Get Down, a weekly block party on Pine Street in Burlington. On any given summer Friday, they’ll have 16 to 20 of the coolest mobile food vendors in the state parked in their Coal Collective lot, slinging everything from arepas to Yemeni kebabs.
They get a lot of those questions, it turns out — at least three or four a week — and they’ve launched a new side business to help answer them. With Food Trucks of Vermont, the Orleans brothers are playing matchmaker between their network of more than 100 food vendors and event organizers around the region who have hungry people to feed. Since its official start on May 1, Food Trucks of Vermont has booked 27 vendors at 15 events, from small corporate catering to full-on festivals. More requests are rolling in each week.
Food Trucks of Vermont has been a boon to some of the area’s newest and smallest food businesses
The idea took form a year and a half ago when Max and Louie, 35, recognized that event organizers often struggled to reach food vendors or wondered who was available. Those vendors are busy folks, and while many big dogs of the food truck world are dialed into the festival circuit, smaller or newer vendors may lack time and budget for marketing. The brothers didn’t want to play favorites when organizers requested recommendations, so they asked them to send a paragraph about the event, which they’d relay “to everyone we know,” Max said.
“It got to be a lot of work, and pretty unorganized,” he continued. During his paternity leave this spring, Max built out a basic Squarespace website to manage the flow. They didn’t tell anyone about it — no Instagram, no advertising. Two days later, the event requests started rolling in.
They had five or six “almost immediately,” Max said. When Waking Windows needed a last-minute vendor the day of the festival, the brothers hooked them up with Winooski’s Le Bon GoûT. Expecting a couple of food vendors to respond to each request, they were thoroughly surprised when 30 submitted quotes for a wedding.
The process has remained simple: Event organizers fill out a web form with the location, time and type of event they’re hosting, along with the expected number of attendees, desired number of food vendors and cuisine preferences. Once they’ve collected a few requests, usually weekly, the Orleans brothers send the opportunities out to their entire roster of vendors and set a deadline to reply.
To protect the process, they keep details vague. Vendors see a “fundraiser in Johnson,” a “corporate event in Burlington” or a “festival in Ticonderoga, N.Y.”
Vendors click a button to submit their application — with either customer-facing prices or a catering quote, depending on the type of event — to Max and Louie, who then compile all the bids to share with the organizer. The organizer selects from the list and handles details directly with the vendor from there, making the brothers just middlemen and not day-of coordinators.
It’s a lot of spreadsheets, Louie said. But so far, Food Trucks of Vermont has been a boon to some of the area’s newest and smallest food businesses. Seham Alsakkaf, who owns Burlington catering biz Yalla Eats, has booked seven or eight events through the Orleans brothers, some through the website and others at the Get Down.
When Alsakkaf started Yalla Eats last year, “it was a failure,” she said. Without a strong community network, she struggled to find events and get the word out about her Yemeni cuisine, which she makes in her certified home kitchen in addition to working a full-time job. This spring, Johanna Schneider, the City of Burlington’s small business support specialist, connected Alsakkaf with Louie and Max.
“That’s all I needed,” Alsakkaf said. Now, four or five event opportunities show up in her inbox every week. If her schedule allows, she submits a quote.
“They just keep sending them, keeping us in the loop of what’s out there,” she said. “That’s what small businesses actually need. Without the great resources Max and Louie are providing and the community around them, I would have quit a long time ago.”
Instead, she’s been catering events such as the spring staff gathering at Lund, a Burlington child and family services nonprofit. By making that connection, Food Trucks of Vermont “provided a practical, people-centered and community-focused” partnership that helped the organization support a local business, said Mychaella Devaney, Lund’s people and culture generalist.
Food Trucks of Vermont isn’t a huge moneymaker for the Orleans brothers — and they don’t mean it to be, Louie said. They charge event organizers a small fee, which varies with the complexity of the event and the amount of support organizers are seeking. Food vendors who book through the service pay 4 percent of that event’s sales, unless the organizer charges them to be there.
“Our joke is ‘As long as we make money to cover the website,'” Louie said. For the No Kings protest at Burlington’s Waterfront Park, they coordinated eight food trucks that fed thousands of people and brought in several hundred bucks.
By making enough of those connections, Food Trucks of Vermont might end up engineering its own obsolescence. Nothing stops an event organizer from rebooking directly with its chosen vendor, or revisiting the list for future events.
“We can’t lose sleep over that,” Max said.
But some organizers are already returning to the service, booking events for 2026. And the landscape of vendors is always changing, given the low barrier to entering the world of food trucks and catering. Many new food businesses try going mobile for two seasons before closing or opening a brick-and-mortar spot.
Alsakkaf hopes she’ll join the ranks of restaurant owners soon with Yalla Eats. When she does, Max and Louie will no doubt find another cool small food biz ready to meet its match.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Game, Truck, Match | Food Trucks of Vermont plays matchmaker for vendors and events”
This article appears in The Connections Issue.
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