Adventures of The Rayback Collective

Photo shows that The Ginger Pig food truck is now open and has a line of people waiting. It is an Asian street food truck. Photo was taken at the Rayback Collective in Boulder, CO

We're approaching month three of our Rayback Collective adventure and day one is still an exciting blur. If you didn't know, our day one was the Rayback's day two and we have to say, the people here are great and feel like family. We're all forging this new path in our lives and it's been in such a supportive and professional environment. We've built a community here and hope to continue bringing you all fun flavorful foods. We love being part of such a cool idea and want to say thank you to the customers supporting the Rayback Collective and to the staff and ownership here.

Speaking of adventure, someone at the Rayback showed me this little ditty made by Mike & Amanda Toillion of the YouTube vlog channel, Don't Panic Adventure Club. The Toillion's are based out of Boulder, where Mike works for NASA and Amanda is a lawyer, and they're documenting their travel adventures locally and around the world. They made this great video about the Rayback Collective for the Don't Panic Adventure Club vlog. It's a pretty smart, fun, and well done vlog that everyone should check out. Anyway, we couldn't help but notice that our truck made an appearance and that you ate our food! We also checked out your YouTube channel and noticed that some of your travel adventure videos take place in Japan. I've been there a few times, we need to trade stories. Come by the truck and say hi!

Shout-out: Annabelle Denmark

Sometimes you're blessed. Annabelle Denmark is blessed with tremendous artistic talent. We are blessed to live next door to her and would like to give her a shameless plug, endorsement, and thank you for working with us. You'll be seeing her work in future blog posts and we just updated the home page with some of the work she did for us. Food photography isn't her main focus, she's a fine art portrait and wedding photographer, and we really really wanted to share her amazing work, it's mesmerizing.

Boulder Pridefest 2016

Rainbow graphic of a heart with the ginger pig logo centered showing that the ginger pig has pride for LGBTQ

Lockdown your Sunday with us at Pridefest, the largest LGBTQ event in Boulder County where we'll be pulling up the truck and serving our Asian-style street food. This event is special to us because we truly understand the meaning of love winning. We've watched our gay friends fight for the basic right to marry as equal citizens under the law and then proudly watched as they said, "I do." We love the coming out stories and the pride that comes from being true to yourself and we love feeding all of you, so come get some food already.

Before swinging by the truck, head out to support the runners, walkers, strollers, and sashayers at the BIG GAY 5K at 10:30am, you should note that this run has a costume contest with cash prizes or head over to the LGBTQ Visibility March at 10:45am for a little "We're here, we're queer, love us already" visibility. When you get hungry, come see our half rainbow colored truck from 11am to 6pm in Boulder Central Park (Broadway & Canyon). Okay, so the truck colors are more an homage to Colorado's colors, but we'd rainbow the hell out of it this week if we could!

Launch Date 7/16/2016

(Video) We passed all of our inspections and are excited to be launching tomorrow 7/16/2016 from 11-3 at Rayback Collective-Boulder Food Park. We'll also be there Sunday from 5-9. Check out this Video our friends at Icon LLC put together telling our story!

Happy Independence Day

Graphic wishing you a Happy Fourth of July

We'd like to wish everyone a happy and safe Independence Day Weekend!

Not There Yet - Getting Closer to the Finish Line

We're getting closer to the finish line everyone! The truck is wrapped, the fire suppression system has been rebuilt to accommodate the new fryers and the fryers have been installed. The health department is saying our 3-compartment sink is too large for our water heater and water tanks. We have ordered a new sink and it is en route. We are getting so close. We are bummed we can’t open this weekend, but we will be opening soon and will keep you posted on the launch date when we know more. We are still planning for a June launch at The Big Wonderful.

Wrapping It Up

Following up on the last time we wrote, when the truck wrap had literally been lost in the mail, and we had to push the launch date back because, well, stuff like that has a cascading scheduling effect. This time, we get to talk about dreams coming to life before our eyes. Not surprisingly, it reminds us a lot of Shrinky Dinks, except your oven in now a blow torch and the outcome is just as magical with a rad looking food truck.

We want to thank Steve's old Wisconsin Badger friend and teammate, Mark Francis, at AGS Wraps for helping us get the wrap printed up, TWICE. Thank you to local installation and wrap professionals, Jeff Johannes and his amazing team at PGI Wraps in Denver for their patience and for allowing us to film the process. They really did an outstanding job installing the wrap on our truck. Shout out to photographer and graphic designer, Clytie Sadler, for consulting with us about our branding efforts and creating The Ginger Pig's logo, website, and the branding we're putting out there.  Finally, thank you to our friend, Justin Preston, of ICON Premier for offering to shoot video of the wrapping process.

We really appreciate everyone's hard work to make this happen and look better than we could have dreamed of.  So cool to see it all coming to life.  We will be trucking soon!

Picture of the Ginger Pig food truck after the wrap guys at PGI were done.

New Launch Date

When it rains, it pours. Unfortunately, our rain date is a real push back of our opening day to sometime in early June 2016 at The Big Wonderful. Everything was going smoothly, but in the last week and a half, our food truck wrap got lost in the mail, it has been reprinted and reshipped and installation began yesterday. We also found out that we need additional gas lines installed and our fire suppression system needs to be rebuilt to accommodate our brand new fryers. Not sure how a 500 square foot piece of vinyl with a big pig on it disappears, but when it is found, we will have our wrap ready for truck # 2.

In other news, I'm freaking drooling over our new fryers and can't wait to fire them up soon. Did I mention the shirts, stickers, and aprons are here and our hats are on the way? Stay tuned to see the goods.

Click HERE to read more about us and stay connected on @GingerPigTruck on Twitter or on Facebook.

Launching a Dream at the Big Wonderful

We are thrilled to be launching our big wonderful food truck, The Ginger Pig, ONE MONTH FROM TODAY, on May 7th at The Big Wonderful in Denver.

The Big Wonderful is very special to us, it's where I first met Marcus, and his truck, The Shiitake Swerve. It was a beautiful Saturday last September in Denver and I went to The Big Wonderful with a couple of friends. I obviously had no idea that we would end up buying the Shiitake Swerve truck at the end of January. By then, Marcus had already become a mentor and a friend.

It is only fitting that we are launching Our Big Wonderful at The Big Wonderful. We are so excited to bring you some authentic Asian street food at The Ginger Pig truck. I'd like to thank everyone that's supported Steve and I along the way, you all know who you are cause I've probably thanked you one, two, or five times.

Click HERE to read more about us and stay connected on @GingerPigTruck on Twitter or on Facebook.