Food trucks battle to help kids in SWFL Hunger Games at Six Bends

Food trucks battle to help kids in SWFL Hunger Games at Six Bends

Story by Charles Runnells via greatfallstribune.com.

Screen Shot 2017-10-27 at 10.36.14 PM

One of the food trucks, Currie’s Smokin Hot BBQ will be one of the truck at the event. Tim Currie, co-owner, cooks up lunch Thursday afternoon. Here he is chopping up brisket. (Photo: Andrea Melendez/The News-Press)

Six Bends Harley-Davidson tried a food-truck competition last year, and it was a huge success.

TOO huge, actually.

Organizers expected maybe 3,000 people for the Food Trucks Wars in April 2016. Instead, they got a whopping 15,000 people, snarled traffic and really long lines for the food trucks.

Now Six Bends is trying the food-competition thing again, and they think they’ve worked out the kinks.

“It’s all live and learn,” says co-organizer Taylor Loethen, program manager of Top Rocker Events at Six Bends. “Overall, the people who were there last year loved the event. So we thought: We can do it differently and do it the right way.”

Enter the brand-new SWFL Hunger Games, a smaller-scale outdoor event that doubles as a fundraiser for Blessings in a Backpack SWFL.

Saturday’s Hunger Games features more than 30 food trucks, restaurants and chefs competing with some of their best dishes. Attendees get to sample food, drink beer and watch live entertainment.

The food offerings include barbecue, donuts, Argentinian food, sliders, cookies, lobster, crepes, kebabs, smoothies, popcorn and much, much more.

Organizers learned some big lessons from the Food Truck Wars, Loethen says, and now they’re applying them to the SWFL Hunger Games.

They kept things smaller and more easily manageable this time, for example. Only 2,500 tickets will be sold, Loethen says.

They’ve also arranged the food trucks differently. Instead of sitting in rows, the trucks will be lined along the fence around the perimeter of Top Rocker Field. That way, all the heat from the trucks’ exhaust and generators will be focused away from the central area instead of pooling there and making people miserable.

“That’s why it was so hot last year,” Loethen says.

Currie’s Smokin Hot BBQ is one of the many food trucks competing at SWFL Hunger Games. Co-owner Tim Currie plans to offer his full menu, including popular dishes such as macaroni and cheese layered with smoked meat and topped with barbecue sauce.

He hasn’t figured out which dish he’ll make specifically for the competition, he says, but he’s working on some ideas.

“I love doing stuff like this,” Currie says. “I love to compete.

“And it helps the kids, too. I have a huge heart for kids — a huge, huge heart.”

Screen Shot 2017-10-27 at 10.33.49 PM

Tice Elementary School students display their food from Blessings in a Backpack SWFL. (Photo: Special to The News-Press)

The kids, of course, are what this is all about.

Blessings in a Backpack gives out backpacks full of food every Friday to needy children in Southwest Florida schools. The kids take the food home to eat during the weekend, and that helps make sure they’re nourished and ready to learn when they return to school Monday.

The charity gives food to about 3,300 local kids in 16 different schools and programs, says Executive Director Cecilia St. Arnold. But she wants to increase that.

About 60,000 Southwest Florida kids qualify for help from Blessings in a Backpack, she says. “We know there’s a need.”

St. Arnold and Loethen worked together to organize the first SWFL Hunger Games. They hope to make it an annual thing, a signature fundraiser for the local chapter of the national Blessings in a Backpack organization — which also happens to be a pet charity of Six Bends owner Scott Fischer.

St. Arnold is the one who first brought up the idea of a fundraiser to Loethen.

“I said, ‘Taylor, I need your help,” St. Arnold says. “We need an idea to get our message out to the community and to have a signature event.”

That’s when Loethen dreamed up the SWFL Hunger Games. Its mission: Satisfying both your stomach and your heart at the same time.

“Yes, it’s a really unique and cool event,” Loethen says. “But the reason we’re doing the event is to help crush hunger in Southwest Florida.”