PMJA Awards, Best Radio COVID-19 Feature-- "Meals on wheels, during the COVID 19 pandemic" APR

Homeowners in the Downs neighborhood of Tuscaloosa line up for brats at Rolf's Food Truck during the COVID-19 pandemic

Please find enclosed Alabama Public Radio’s entry for the PMJA Award for Best Radio COVID-19 Feature Story, titled “Meals On Wheels During Covid-19.” Click here for the story.

https://www.apr.org/post/meals-wheels-during-covid-19-pandemic

The coronavirus cost restaurants in Tuscaloosa up to eighty percent of their business. However, the pandemic led to a renaissance for one part of the hospitality industry—food trucks.

Local residents, who complained they’d been eating out of their refrigerators for weeks, began networking on social media to arrange for local food trucks to visit their neighborhoods. The restaurant industry responded with a Facebook page featuring a rolling schedule of eateries sending their food trucks out into residential areas. Families would pour out of their homes to order hamburgers, hot wings, and blended fruit concoctions called “smoothie bowls.”

APR spent three weeks following five food truck operators, including twenty two year old Riley Voce who sells “smoothie bowls.” The University of Alabama junior, majoring in business, invested in a food truck, complete with a surfboard countertop and a big pineapple on the back, to sell his dessert menu items. Before COVID, UA students lined up with hands full of vouchers known as “dining dollars,” or “monopoly money” as Voce calls it, to buy bowls. The coronavirus banned students from the UA campus, shutting off Voce’s primary source of business. He switched to neighborhood visits to keep his food truck afloat, and plans to buy a second truck specifically for residential stops. Voce wants to remember the people who remembered him during the pandemic.

One concern voiced by food truck patrons was the general lack of face masks and gloves by the staff members serving customers. APR interviewed a UA professor who's researched the food truck industry for her thoughts on the COVID threat posed by these rolling eateries compared to "brick and mortar" establishments.

This story was part of an innovative collaboration between Alabama Public Radio, the commercial TV newsroom at WVUA23, and the University of Alabama's Center for Public TV, to operate a joint COVID-19 journalism unit.

Respectfully submitted,

Pat Duggins, News Director

Alabama Public Radio