We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Shane Loomis. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Shane below.

Alright, Shane thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. 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.

Our food truck concept is called Top Nach, and we specialize in gourmet nachos (along with cheese-crusted burritos). Too often, nachos are piles of chips with toppings dumped on only the first layer, leaving soggy chips on top and naked chips on the bottom. We solve those problems by serving our nachos in a single layer so every chip stays crisp and gets covered in just the right amount of cheese, fresh toppings, and homemade sauces. By the time we opened our food truck in 2021, the idea had been over a decade in the making.

During college, my wife (Missy) and I worked in the Philadelphia restaurant industry where the food scene literally changed our lives. We both always loved food and going out to eat, but we had never experienced quality and craftsmanship on that level before. We worked at one restaurant together where the nachos ruined all others for us, and our disappointment in other nachos over the years made us realize we found a niche.

We didn’t take the idea too seriously until Missy was recruited for an out-of-state job in 2015 and we moved to Fort Wayne, Indiana. I found a job in insurance, and we started getting settled into our new 9-to-5 lives. It didn’t take long for us to figure out that we didn’t want to work in the corporate world long term. We were making decent money, but neither of us were particularly happy or fulfilled in our jobs. We found an escape in cooking and trying out the local restaurants in our new food scene. Fort Wayne has some great restaurants, but the one thing we could never find was nachos that lived up to the experience at our former restaurant.

One day, we went to a local brewery with a reputation for good food, so we decided to give their nachos a shot. When they came out, we were horrified to find old, stale, store-bought chips, topped with half melted slices of processed American cheese. As we sat there drinking our beers and critiquing these “nachos,” we made it our mission to start a nacho business one day. Missy jokingly said we should call it “Top Nach,” and it stuck.

We started making nachos at home and took inspiration from our former restaurant — like making chips from freshly fried tortillas and laying them flat. We experimented with our own recipes and tested them on our friends, family, and neighbors. Our nachos kept getting better, and we knew we wanted to pursue our own food truck or restaurant, but we had no idea how we’d ever afford it.

Missy ended up being recruited for a job in Fort Myers, Florida. We moved there in 2017 and started over again. Missy continued her marketing career, and I finally put my education degree to use by taking a job as a Reading teacher at a middle school. After two years, a Culinary Arts teaching role opened up, and I jumped on it. For the next couple of years, I taught cooking to students between the ages of 11-15. During that time, my food knowledge and skills kept growing, and I continued to work on the Top Nach recipes. Missy and I still wanted to start the business, but we tried to be patient while we waited until it made sense financially.

And then the pandemic happened. Luckily, we both kept our jobs, but Missy took a huge pay cut. She eventually found a new, completely virtual job while I continued to teach. As 2020 was coming to an end, the housing market started booming. After seeing what the houses around us were going for, we realized we could sell ours to make enough money to finally buy our food truck! Since Missy’s job was fully remote for the first time, we realized we could live wherever we wanted. We decided to move to Baltimore to be closer to family, friends, and a major food hub. I knew the food truck scene was pretty popular in Maryland in general from years of research, so it all came together. We sold our house and officially established Top Nach in April 2021. We ordered our custom truck, found a place to live (sight-unseen), and we headed back up north to make our Top Nach dreams a reality!

Can you tell us how you got into your industry?

Once we found our love for cooking and the idea for Top Nach was born, I felt I needed to experience working in a food truck to see if it was something I wanted to do as a career. While I was teaching full-time, I got a part-time job working at a local BBQ truck. It felt great to be back in the foodservice industry, and I found that I never really dreaded going into work for those food truck shifts.

Working for other food trucks was an invaluable experience that helped me break into the industry. I learned so much about the business and picked up a bunch of tips and tricks that have helped us in our journey. I highly recommend that any aspiring entrepreneurs get some real-world experience in their field before starting their own business.

What do you think sets you apart from others? What are you most proud of?

My first food truck experience helped me see that people wanted real, good food made with love. At the same time, I saw that a lot of trucks weren’t focused on making high-quality food — they were all about the money. It honestly made me mad seeing people pay good money for food that wasn’t worth it or that they could easily make at home. We decided that our main goal would be to make delicious, homemade (scratch) food with fresh ingredients. With that idea in mind, we set out to make our food the superpower of our business.

We’re proud of the effort we put into the development of our recipes and branding. We think our dedication to making great food and providing great customer service is what sets us apart from many other trucks and restaurants. We want you to not only be happy with the food, but with how you spent your money. With the prices of everything skyrocketing right now, we know money can be tight. We appreciate everyone who spends their hard-earned money at our truck, and we want it to be worth it. It’s great if we’re making money, but if our customers aren’t happy, neither are we.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

We had to unlearn our traditional careers. Before the pandemic hit, we settled for being comfortable — financially and with our 9-to-5 routines. We worked during the week and lived for the weekend, and that’s all we really knew. It’s what our parents and everyone around us did. We felt trapped by the notion that we had to continue in our careers (which neither of us were crazy about) until we retired. Our priorities didn’t change until COVID disrupted our lives and made us realize what was most important. It was scary to take the leap into the unknown, but the idea of spending our lives doing something we didn’t love was even scarier. Now, we work harder and longer hours than ever, but it’s so much more fulfilling. We no longer get “Sunday scaries” or that feeling of dread before work the next day. Since we work most weekends during the year, it’s been harder to visit with friends and family who work during the week — but we’ve learned to block time in our calendars well in advance to spend however we want. We’re finally in control of our lives and schedules as our own bosses, and the freedom makes it all worth it.

Do you have any insights you can share related to maintaining high team morale?

Managing a team has been one of the most difficult parts of starting Top Nach. Finding employees was difficult in the beginning, but dealing with the dynamics that come with having employees has been even more difficult. Being such a new company, we’re obviously not experts at this, but we try to stick by two ideas to keep morale high. First and foremost, we believe that we work for our employees and not the other way around. Our goal is to treat them well and make them happy. We also try to keep in mind that no matter how good an employee is, they’ll never care about the business as much as we do – and, that’s not a bad thing. Our truck is our baby and we shouldn’t expect others to treat it like it’s theirs. We still keep our standards high for all of our employees, but we understand if they aren’t willing to do all of the things that we do to help our business grow.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.topnachbmore.com
• Instagram: @topnachbmore
• Facebook: @topnachbmore
• Youtube: @topnachbmore
• Other: TikTok: @topnachbmore

Image Credits
The Nacho Close Up pic was taken by Willy Dely. All other photos taken by us.