Happy belly food truck menu atlanta

Owners Terry and Dawn Hall created Happy Belly Curbside Kitchen out of their experiences, knowledge, skills, and interests. The founders had 30 years of experience in the hospitality busi- ness. They traveled extensively across the United States to meet the requirements of their careers in hospitality. They were the children of small business owners and have restaurant experience combined with formal hospitality education.

Terry and Dawn recognized several patterns in their travels:

1. The availability of fresh, natural food is far less than the need for it.

2. Declines in small-business viability. 3. Theinverserelationshipbetweentheavail-

ability of healthy food and the level of obesity.

When their daughter, Mayer, was born, Terry and Dawn decided that they wanted her to eat only healthy, fresh foods. They were frustrated by how dif- ficult it was to find the food they wanted when they ate in restaurants. And, they wanted flexibility in work schedules and the opportunity to support their com- munity. This led to the idea of creating a mobile res- taurant serving the fresh, healthy foods they desired.

After the initial frustration of being turned down repeatedly by mainstream banks, even though they had related work experience, savings, excellent credit, and no debt, the Halls learned of a financing resource in their community that had different parameters. They secured their initial fi- nancing from Access to Capital for Entrepreneurs (ACE Capital), a Cleveland, Georgia-based com- munity development financial institution. ACE had a combination of its own resources and funds from Create Jobs for USA available and was look- ing for borrowers like the Halls. The loan process took seven days for approval. With the funding from ACE, Happy Belly was able to get rolling. The Halls remodeled their commercial kitchen, pur- chased a food truck, and hired some dozen people.