Damaged goods food truck full#

After all, Americans clearly love the convenience and novelty of buying food from mobile machines.įood boats face lots of regulations and restrictions. You can find them in Michigan and Maine, as well.įood boats, I assumed, must be about to explode like food trucks. Swimmers can cool down with a frozen treat from Bay Ice Cream in Panama City, Fla. There are a handful of vessels around the country peddling food from oceans, lakes and rivers.īoaters and sandbar-bathers alike can get their lunch grilled on food boats like Burger Buoy in New York and Burger Barge in Oregon. It's like a food truck, afloat.Īnd it turns out the Ice Cream Boat is not alone. When I first encountered the seasonal fixture of the Ice Cream Boat last summer, I thought: This is genius. Captain Tim Titcomb maneuvers the 15-foot Carolina skiff along the sandy beaches of Sampson's Island, where beach-goers await Good Humor Chocolate Eclairs and Popsicles. In Cotuit Bay, near Cape Cod, those rings signal the arrival of the Ice Cream Boat.

The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.Captain Tim Titcomb maneuvers his 15-foot Carolina skiff along the sandy beaches of Sampson's Island, Mass., in July 2014. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at for further information. For NPR News, I'm Aaron Schachter in Boston.Ĭopyright © 2017 NPR. And that's good news for the salvors of the world. Insurance companies around the world had to deal with nearly a billion dollars' worth of damaged goods last year. SCHACHTER: Mike Mentuck's not joking here. MENTUCK: My Rolodex is worth a million bucks because I think I know everybody in the country that's interested in buying salvage of any kind. There are only about half a dozen serious salvors in the U.S. SCHACHTER: Losing business would be a big deal because there's big money to be made. So we try like hell not to make mistakes. So we don't want to lose business because we make a mistake. You know, a reputation is a hard thing to build up and a very easy thing to lose. It sounds creepy that cheese that was in an accident might end up on my kid's sandwich.ĭOUGLAS MENTUCK: This industry is based on our reputation. But isn't there something kind of off about food that was in an overturned truck being resold? I asked Mentuck's son, Doug. Most of the stuff is snapped up by distributors who resell it to department stores, supermarkets and food banks. He's worked in 38 countries, all 50 states and 10 Canadian provinces.

What Mentuck unloads goes just about everywhere. Within a couple days, a supermarket in Tennessee and guys in Saudi Arabia and India offered to buy the cheese for 30 grand, saving the insurance company about 30 percent. SCHACHTER: What Walsh found was a truckload of perfectly good cheese. I go out to the scene and I document what it is. And the morning after that cheese truck crash, Walsh got the call. SCHACHTER: Bob Walsh is a senior claims adjuster with a company called Claims Management Services. The smoke-damaged coffins can last forever, but a good bit of what he deals with is perishable, frozen or refrigerated food worth hundreds of thousands of dollars being transported around the world - lobster, shrimp, haddock and cheese.īOB WALSH: Claims Management Services. SCHACHTER: Joking aside, to do what Mentuck does you've got to be fast. I'll leave it to you to figure out the first. MENTUCK: The salvage business is what we like to say is the second oldest profession in the world. His motto - the impossible we do right away. SCHACHTER: Mentuck's a bit of a comedian. I've sold brand-new television sets in a rolled over truck. MENTUCK: I've brought planes up from the bottom of the ocean.

Damaged goods food truck full#

SCHACHTER: Most of the work is done directly for insurance companies that would lose a pile if they had to pay full damages. I mean, just anything that's ever been insured we've handled. MIKE MENTUCK: Everything from an anchor to a needle. He's a salvor, someone who handles stuff salvaged from fires, floods, earthquakes, tornadoes, truck wrecks. SCHACHTER: This is Mentuck's bread and butter, so to speak. UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: A tractor trailer carrying 38,000 pounds of cheese overturned at Exit 10 on I-93 South. Aaron Schachter of member station WGBH introduces us to that guy.ĪARON SCHACHTER, BYLINE: Mike Mentuck is the kind of guy who can get you a truckload of goat meat or a hundred smoke-damaged coffins or 19 tons of cheese that was on its way to a large supermarket. He can get you a great deal after something's gone wrong. But then there's the guy we're about to meet. Maybe a good car guy, the guy at the butcher shop who save scraps for your dog, a cigar guy.