The app will eventually locate food trucks, too.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
Soft-serve aficionados, rejoice: A new mobile app is coming your way.
Movable Feast, an app that will allow users to pinpoint the nearest ice cream truck using their smartphones, is set to launch for the official summer start date of June 21.
Heather Cromarty, a Toronto writer, came up with the idea earlier this spring when a nearby friend posted on Facebook that an ice cream truck had just passed their house. The post sparked a craving, but also inspiration: What if it was possible to co-ordinate soft-serve pick-ups by locating ice cream trucks within your proximity, while also being able to see in which direction a given truck is travelling?
"When you want ice-cream-truck ice cream, it is so not the same to get something from the convenience store," says Ms. Cromarty, who promptly enlisted her friend, programmer and app developer Tim Sullivan, to get on board the project.
Mr. Sullivan agreed, with some trepidation.
"The people who are selling ice cream tend not to be technically savvy, as opposed to normal food trucks, where everyone on the truck has a smartphone and is tweeting incessantly about where they are."
Movable Feast aims to nudge ice cream truck drivers into the 21st century by facilitating co-ordinated sales.
"Instead of these trucks being an impulse, we want them to be a destination," says Mr. Sullivan.
So far, ice cream truck drivers have been involved in the conversation, and Ms. Cromarty says they've been receptive. Both she and Mr. Sullivan hope to expand the app to pinpoint food trucks that serve more than just ice cream. They also hope to offer the service beyond Toronto.
"Our goal here is to get something that's really easy to use in the hands of as many ice cream trucks as we can," says Mr. Sullivan.