We recently connected with Santiago Restrepo and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Santiago, thanks for joining us today. How did you come up with the idea for your business?

I started thinking about having an Arepa restaurant after living in Los Angeles for a few years. It came to me after realizing there was something I wanted that was not available anywhere in LA. I knew the Arepa was something that needed to be introduced to this foodie market and had the potential of becoming a very popular dish. Growing up in Colombia, the Arepa is a dish we have as a part of most of our daily meals. The fact that it was not found anywhere around me was making me realize that there was a big opportunity to bring it to this market.

Santiago, 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?

I grew up in Bogota, Colombia. When i turned 13, I moved to Los Angeles, CA with my family. I met my wife in 2010 and we started our Arepa food truck business in 2016. We have been taking our truck to festivals, caterings and all kinds of events ever since. We are proud to serve Colombian/Venezuelan style Arepas. It’s something that is hard to find in LA which has helped us become very popular. We operate 5 days a week and use our off days to prep and re stock. Our popularity has come from our consistency and hard work. No matter what happens, we make sure we keep going out, we participate in all the events we can, we spread the word about this amazing dish and we make sure people get to know about us.

Can you open up about how you funded your business?

In order to start our business, we had to make a small investment. We needed to buy a small food trailer and test our idea out before making a bigger investment. My wife and I took money from our savings and bought a small used food trailer. We used it to go out on the weekends while we held on to our jobs, We put away all the money from our food trailer earnings and after we had saved enough, we decided to make a bigger investment and build our own, bigger food trailer. By this point, we had already built our business to a point that allowed us to quit our regular jobs and do this full time. This was around 2019. We have been doing this full time ever since and our business keeps growing.

Has your business ever had a near-death moment? Would you mind sharing the story?

We started doing our business full time around 2019. At this point, it was our only source of income. We relied on foodie events, caterings, and our weekly sunday market in DTLA for the majority of our income. When the pandemic hit in 2020, all the events, caterings and the weekly market in DTLA, stopped. We had gone from a pretty reliable schedule to nothing. We had no more events to go to. It was a very scary time and it made us ponder wether or not we were gonna have to quit and go back to our regular jobs. We decided, let’s hit the streets. We started parking on the street and in front of coffee shops. It was not the income we were used to but it was keeping us above water. After staying on the streets for a while, we developed a fairly loyal clientele and managed to keep our business afloat through the pandemic. As much as it was very scary at the time, it helped us develop a whole new group of followers that we would not have had access to had we not ventured into all these new places.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.susarepas.net
• Instagram: www.instagram.com/susarepas
• Facebook: www.facebook.com/susarepas
• Twitter: www.twiter.com/susarepas

Image Credits
Santiago Restrepo