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Vancouver City Council is overhauling its street food program, bringing in minimum nutritional standards and ditching its food cart lottery.

Applauding the success of a street food pilot that has seen everything from fish balls to mashed-potato-and-gravy-stuffed croissants sold on Vancouver streets, the city will license 60 new food cart locations over four years - 30 downtown and 30 elsewhere.

Rather than hold a lottery to select the winners, the city will create a panel of experts (including chefs, food writers and a nutritionist) to evaluate applicants on criteria including nutritional content, menu diversity and use of local, organic, and fair trade food. Business plans, experience and qualifications, vendor readiness and environmental factors will also be considered.

But it was the staff recommendation that "minimum recognized nutritional standards as defined by provincial health professionals" be met by all new street food vendors that raised some concerns that council might be biting off more than it should chew.

"Boy, when I read that I see food police, I see nanny state. ...Where's the dividing line between being food police and being nutritionally good?" said Councillor Suzanne Anton, who ultimately voted for the new system.

Wendy Mendes of the city's community services group assured council that the expectations would be reasonable. "Our intention is in no way to be the food police and to implement carrot and celery carts across every corner of the city."

Staff indicated that there were "spirited discussions" taking place behind the scenes in an attempt to find the right balance between hot dog lovers and granola crunchers.

In Toronto, where nutritional content was among the criteria for a food cart pilot project introduced in 2009, red tape has nearly strangled the initiative.

Like Vancouver's program, "Toronto a la cart" was designed to bring healthy, ethnically diverse food to the street. But the rules were so strict that only eight vendors wound up taking part. They struggled with a cumbersome prefab cart, the city's preference for "locally sustainable produced food," and a rule initially forcing owners to work their carts 70 per cent of the time, to keep fast food chains from applying. Several vendors have either quit or are unsure they'll return this summer for the final season of the three-year pilot project.

In contrast, under Vancouver's pilot program, launched last year, there were 14 new operators (17 were originally licensed) and six hot-dog-cart conversions. With Thursday's vote, the vendors licensed under the pilot program will be incorporated into the regular street-vending program.

Chester Carey with ReUp Barbecue - the object of rave views and constant lineups - said he was concerned about the new criteria. "I'm a little apprehensive about some of the potential requirements, given that we were only able to succeed because it was a lottery system and we weren't required to meet any requirements."

With a report from Kelly Grant

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