We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Andrew Rodriguez a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Andrew, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Let’s start with the story of your mission. What should we know?
I’ve been an entrepreneur my whole life. I’ve started my fair share of businesses, and its in my DNA; my Grandfather was an entrepreneur, my mother as well. Back in 2017, I was playing around with the idea of starting a food truck or food cart in our local college bar scene here in Southern CA. After a lengthy search, I discovered that it was actually more costly upfront to start a mobile business, than it was to start a brick & mortar. Upwards of 6 figures, and an incredible amount of regulations that made it impossible to build on my own. I thought, this can’t be real, there has to be a more affordable, easier option for people who don’t want to take out a business loan or pay 5-6 figures for a small cart. This is where the idea of ‘Arete Food Trailers’ was sparked. Our entire mission was to provide the most cost effective option for people to start a business, and now we do just that, offering the best value in the industry.
Andrew, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
The name Arete was picked because it means “Striving for excellence and virtue,” and for me its always been about being a social entrepreneur. Arete strives to set a charitable example. As mentioned, we offer the best value in the industry. Currently, we have trailer options starting at $9,699, which is a fraction of what most builders offer here in the states. The lowest option builders we know of, start around $40,000. We also guide people through the health code process, and build to help meet local regulations. As a result, we quickly grew from a small home-based family business, to one of the largest distributors of food and retail trailers in the U.S. We’ve built over 500 trailers with our factory, and help over 100 businesses per year. Our profits aren’t as big as some of the other guys, but the reward of helping a family who otherwise wouldn’t have the resources to start something, far outweighs the monetary gain. We also promote several charities close to our heart; kiva.org, actionagainsthunger, thewaterproject, and several native american charities. We do microfinancing through kiva.org, which I believe the one of the best ways to give back, it allows other people and villages in 3rd world countries access to funds, to help start a business, grow crops, build sustainable plumbing, etc. And a high majority of the money gets paid back into the system to help another charity, and so on. Bringing this charity awareness to light on our website and every email, we hope it encourages other entrepreneurs to gain a better perspective and bless others when they can.
Can you tell us about what’s worked well for you in terms of growing your clientele?
I’ve always been a big believer in bootstrapping for a startup business, it allows you to really get into the nitty gritty details of the company, and develops a clear understanding of the industry you are getting into. On top of that, your’e providing a lower startup capital, and higher return on your investment. So when we started Arete, it was just like all my other businesses, you do a ton of research, build the website from scratch, find my own builders, essentially creating our own factory from scratch, doing all the copyrighting myself, shooting all the photos, creating all of our logistics channels, running the social media, etc. This is that stereotypical, entrepreneur trait of wearing many hats. You learn as you go in most cases; for example, if now we need to pass health codes in CA, lets lookup the codes and find sources for a 3 compartment sink, or now we need a way to get a trailer to Boise, ID, now we find the best way to find drivers, etc. Through this, we did all of our own SEO, and we took the best parts of websites and trailer buildouts from other companies, and adopted some to our own. The end result, we have a high ranking professional website, professional product, and most of our traffic comes from free marketing like google seo, yelp, offerup listings, etc. Later down the line, we developed our own reputation, with unique designs that would catch people’s eye and our customers would get many inquiries daily as to where they bought their trailer. Word of mouth is one of the most powerful forms of marketing, especially for a high ticket purchase like a trailer. The key to this is providing real value to the customer. We laid out our website www.AreteFoodTrailers.com to be very easy and quick to get information and pricing upfront, and streamline the whole process for our clients based upon the research we’ve done.
Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?
Back in 2020, government regulations increased on U.S. based imports. At this time, we were shipping multiple 40 ft high cube containers to various U.S. ports on a weekly basis with our customer’s food trailers inside. One day we got a notice from our broker that about 7 of our containers had been seized by U.S. customs. If you know anything about imports, the worst part of a seizure if the potential storage fees imposed upon you by the steamship lines. Major shipping carriers like cosco will charge you daily for not returning their containers upwards of $1,500 a day. After about a week, we found out that we had been missing certain licensing requirements for our company with DOT and NHTSA. We had been building our trailers fully up to U.S. code and regulations, but our company was missing a key registration that nobody had notified us about after years in operation. Upon filing for the license, we soon realized it was a lengthy process of inspection and approval, which normally takes 3-6 months. We were dealing with a federal government agency, and every effort to try and at least remove our cargo from the containers was being stalled. We were being charged thousands per day in storage, with the governing agencies attempting to destroy all the cargo for being “unlicensed.” The worst part was knowing that the businesses and investments of over 2 dozen families were in jeopardy. Any attempt of getting sympathy from the government was helpless. This was quite literally the end of our entire mission, our entire efforts, after finally finding our passion for helping others. At this point, as a Christian, I turned to my faith. We prayed to God, asking for guidance, to help resolve the situation, allowing us to spread this exact testimony to everyone anytime we get a chance, and that we would fully turn it over to Him and trust in whatever happens next. That same day, we reached out to our local congressman, which seemed like a longshot after countless emails pleading with just about everyone in every position of government agencies, the shipping line CEO’s, middle managers, etc. Shortly thereafter, we received a response from our local congressman Pete Aguilar’s office, who understood our urgency and agreed to help write us a letter to the DOT NHTSA offices. We maintained faith, and soon thereafter, we received a miracle, in that the DOT NHTSA agents were now willing to help expedite our licensing process. It took us about 2 weeks to become a fully licensed domestic and foreign manufacturer under DOT/NHTSA, and we were able to get our containers fully released at each port. We were able to deliver all of our trailers to our customers safely. If you could fully understand the scope of this situation, the urgency, the stress of every client pleading with us, and every single attempt to get some sort of sympathy from anyone that was going absolutely nowhere, and then a simple letter was able to turn it all around, it was a real life miracle. This strengthened the conviction of our faith, to allow us to give this testimony, and gave us a new understanding that what we were doing was in fact good, and supported by a higher power.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.aretefoodtrailers.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/aretefoodtrailers/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/aretefoodtrailers
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-rodriguez-425179319/
- Twitter: https://x.com/AreteTrailers
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@aretefoodtrailers909
- Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/arete-food-trailers-rancho-cucamonga-3
Image Credits
Highway Tacos
SemiFreddo Frozen Dessert + Provisions
The Sip Rig
The Market
Fuel Coffee Bar
ABC News & Family Farms