We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Matt Korsky a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Matt, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.
The whole story starts in 2013 when I was training for an Ironman triathlon and came across a book called Finding Ultra by Rich Roll. It outlined his evolution from an alcoholic drug addict to a world renowned athlete, author and podcaster through switching his diet and lifestyle to being vegan. At this point in my life I was feeling pretty stuck in my career as a health & physical education teacher. The book opened my eyes to a whole new way of eating and ultimately living. After doing a few more months of reading and research about vegan diets I decided I had nothing to lose. The night I decided to go vegan I was in my kitchen washing dishes and told my wife that my plan to adopt a vegan diet and she looked at me dead in the eyes and said “good luck, I’m not”. Little did she know a few months later she would end up going vegan as well. In just a few weeks I noticed a tremendous difference in how I felt, looked and thought. The changes continue to happen and within a few months I felt like an entirely whole new person, I had dropped 5 pants sizes and had endless amounts of energy. At the same time veganism had taken over all of my thoughts. My whole day seemed to be wrapped up in finding new recipes to cook, educating myself on the environmental impacts of a traditional American diet as well as the ethical implications. As I noted earlier my wife also transitioned to a vegan diet and both of us began cooking a lot which was partly by choice because at the time there were not a tremendous amount of places that offered vegan options let alone a fully vegan establishment. Two years after I had gone vegan I got certified to be a vegan lifestyle coach & educator through Victoria Moran’s Main Street Vegan Academy. It was a week long course that was the catalyst to the decision I made to leave my career as a school teacher. I knew at that point I wanted/needed to focus my life on veganism. At the end of that next school year I made the bold move of leaving my 13 year stable career of teaching. Most people including my family members and friends thought I was nuts, at this point in my wife and I had a home, 2 children and multiple car payments. I was now making the decision to leave my steady well paying job to go tell people to eat more kale and tofu. To be honest I really didn’t know what I wanted to do or what direction I was headed I just knew that I no longer wanted to teach and needed to do something with veganism.
My wife and I had been vegan at this point for 5+ years we had seen that there was a growing community of people looking for that were looking for more vegan food options. At the time on Long Island where we live there wasn’t very many places that offered a fully vegan experience let alone vegan options. Both my wife and I have always had entrepreneurial ambitions and decided we would open up our own location to meet the needs of our growing community. We made multiple attempts to start our own vegan cafe, we were initially going to partner with an existing juice bar and help them grow their upstart business. That didn’t pan out when the main business owner backed out. We then decided to give it a go on our own and found a great location and decided that we would also include a small yoga studio into the works. We had left a deposit and were days away from signing a lease when I started to have a bad feeling in my gut. We made the difficult decision to back out and continue on with our search. I found that a fairly new all vegan business was looking to expand and I reached out to them about partnering. After a few meetings I began to work at their location and we also began to search for a suitable second location. Same as before we found a great spot that was actually just a few storefronts down from where we had just almost signed a lease. We had paperwork being drawn up for the lease and partnership and I put down a significant deposit. A week later I received an email from the business owners that they were getting cold feet and weren’t ready to expand and pulled out of the deal. At this point I was feeling very dejected and was beginning to believe that this vegan food business just wasn’t meant to be. The universe had been sending me enough messages that I should just give up and move on. I decided to just give it a rest for a few months and see if I still had any ambition to pursue a food business.
In April of 2018 my family and I took a roadtrip to Philadelphia for a short vacation. While we were there we enjoyed some amazing vegan food and had a great reprieve from the hustle and bustle of our every day lives. On the drive back I had the thought of opening a vegan food truck. Although I had only ever eaten from a food truck once they seemed to be getting more popular in our area and seemingly was a less expensive choice than opening a brick and mortar. The great thing about a food truck is that there isn’t the expectation that they are open seven days a week and I would be able to take off when I needed. My wife thought it was a great idea and gave me the go ahead to start researching the food truck concept. A month later I found a food truck manufacturer in Virginia and worked with them to create layout for the food truck and picked out the necessary equipment. At this point I took out all of my money from my retirement account (which wasn’t too much), all of my savings and all of my 3 kids college funds and decided we would go all in on this attempt. I left a $5,000 deposit and was told the food truck would be ready to be picked up in 6 weeks. I myself thought I was nuts this time because I had just wired 5k to someone to purchase a food truck site unseen, but something inside of my just felt different. I kept my fingers crossed that this would workout and prayed like I never had before.
Six weeks later I got an email that the truck was ready to be picked up, I booked a one way flight to D.C. for the following week. I flew down there with a $35k+. bank check in bag & a stomach full of butterflies. A quick 35 minute Uber landed me at the food truck shop. After signing a few papers and a quick run through of how the different equipment worked I was on way back to NY.
A month later (July 2018) we had our very first food truck event. We were the very first vegan food truck to hit the streets of Long Island. We hit the ground running, even through my wife and I had zero clue what we were doing. Neither of us had any restaurant experience beyond being a waiter. Neither of us had any experience of running a business but we did have a thirst for excitement and a deep belief that we were on the right path. We had a lot of ups and downs that first year and for the majority of it we were making just enough money to enable us to buy food to be open the next week. Business started to slowly pickup and we began to get invited to a lot of events as veganism was growing quickly. That first year in business we got voted as one of the top 5 places to eat on Long Island. In our 3rd & 4th year in business we were voted the best food truck on Long Island.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
A lot of who I am and my story was shared in the previous question but I will elaborate a bit more.
I stumbled into being a vegan restaurant entrepreneur through my journeying of being vegan. I never planned on going vegan, in fact it was the last thing I had ever planned on doing. The same is true with owning a restaurant, I never had an ambition to work at or own a restaurant until I had gone vegan. Something inside of me changed through when I adopted a vegan lifestyle. My outlook on life and what I wanted to do with my life changed. Before my only goal in life beyond being a good husband and father was to make a lot of money so I could buy lots of nice things. After going vegan and on a spiritual journey through yoga I became more focused on serving others. Through serving others you create a deeper & true sense of satisfaction and joy. When I stopped pursuing “things” and started making decisions around being of service to others I found what I was truly meant to do with my time on earth. `
We started Green Street because there was a void in our community, at the time there was one other place offering the type of food we ate. There were others offering some vegan junk food options but not many. We also noticed that the gluten-free community was underserved and no one was really offering great options. We figured that by offering a fully vegan & gluten-free establishment we would be able to tap into a few different markets at the same time. The vegan community was happy to be able to eat at a place freely without having to mix and match different menu choices to come up with a vegan meal. The gluten-free community was happy that they could also eat freely without an worry of cross contamination and come to find out didn’t care that it was vegan as long as they didn’t get “glutened”.
We also wanted to create a place that was nonjudgmental, that everyone felt welcomed and was focused on customer service. Although our food was all vegan we want everyone to feel that it’s a place that they can come and get great food, that is good for them and doesn’t break the bank. You do not need to be vegan or gluten-free to eat our food, you just have to want to enjoy great food. We strive to show people that vegan food is the same as any other type of food it’s just made with a few different ingredients. We get really excited when we have self proclaimed carnivores tell us how much they enjoy our food and how we’ve changed the way they look at vegan food.
Can you tell us the story behind how you met your business partner?
My wife and I had just finished a yoga class at our local gym. At the end of our class we were talking to the teacher about how our food truck business was going and how our kids were doing. At the same time our future business partner who was just in the same yoga class was talking to one of the other fitness instructors and mutual acquaintances about what her plans were now that she was back in the States. Caroline (business partner) had left about a year and a half ago to travel the world after quitting her career and had travelled back home to England to help take care of her mother who was battling cancer. Her mother had successfully recovered and just recently come back to Long Island. She had told the fitness instructor that she had plans to do something with veganism and was thinking of opening a vegan food truck. Our mutual friend then pointed to me who was standing just a few feet away owned a vegan food truck and said you need to go talk to Matt. Caroline came over and started chatting with my wife and I about veganism and what we were doing. I ended up walking away while my wife and her were chatting to continue my conversation with the yoga instructor. My wife took Caroline’s contact information and I reached out to her later that day. She ended up working on the food truck a few days later and began working regularly on the food truck. We became fast friends and quickly realized that we both complimented each other in the ways that the other was lacking. She became an integral part of our food truck business. We all (my wife, Caroline & I) had the same vision and belief that Green Street could be more than just a food truck and that we together we would make a great team. We began looking at different locations for our first storefront and were ready to sign a lease on one when 2020 hit. We made decision to put the storefront on hold, which in hindsight was clearly a great move. In 2021 we stumbled upon a closed down Subway location and within a few short weeks of when we fist looked at the location we signed a lease to secure our first brick and mortar.
How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?
Coming into 2020 our food truck was on a roll, we had just been voted one of the top 5 places to eat on Long Island and had a very successful 1st full year in business. We had already secured $100K+ worth of events for this upcoming year and were anticipating a huge year ahead then March 15th of 2020 happened. The world began shutting down and day after day more emails came in cancelling all of events and requesting refunds for deposits paid. Along with everyone else I had no clue what to expect, businesses all around us were being forced to shut their doors. It was certainly uncertain times and it was difficult to wrap our heads around what the next steps were. Should we continue to operate as is, will our customers have a not so favorable opinion of us if we stay open during such uncertain times? Is it safe to operate? Am I putting my family and myself at risk by staying open? Will anyone even show up if we stay operating? Will I be able to find all the necessary ingredients so we can stay open?
We decided we would stay open and operate as “normal” as possible. Instead of allowing customers to order & pay in person we had everyone text their orders & payments in the day before & each were given a scheduled time to pick up. Although it increased my workload tremendously it enabled our customers to feel safe. With the extra time on our hands from being home more we began to experiment more with new recipes and my wife starting to really develop a knack for vegan & gluten-free baking. We focused more of our time to our social media platforms displaying new menu items & baked goods. Because our customers also had more time on their hands we noticed an increase in activity on our social media accounts which quickly translated into increased business. Each time we went out we would be “sold out” before we even started the day with every time slot booked. Our business began to boom, at the same time our friends that had brick and mortars were suffering. With all of our events cancelled we decided we could put on our own events and also work to help our fellow business owners. I came up with the idea of doing “Vegan Mashups”, we would collaborate with other businesses that were offering vegan food or vegan options we would bring our food truck to their brick and mortar location and do a mini-veg fest. These mashups became a huge boon for all the business involved with everyone being sold-out.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.greenstreetfoodtruck.com & www.greenstreeteatery.com
- Instagram: @greenstreetfoodtruck & @greenstreeteatery
- Facebook: /greenstreetfoodtruck & /greenstreeteatery
- Yelp: Green Street Food Truck & Green Street Eatery
Image Credits
Linda Rosier -Image of Me hanging out of the food truck with tacos in my hand