Bisnow Scoop: Snap Kitchen’s New Home

It’s a marriage made in foodie heaven. Snap Kitchen’s wholesome pre-packaged food on the go just inked a 6,000 SF lease for its commercial kitchen at the home of 27 food trucks. We sat down with the building owners to get the skinny on eating healthy.

Here’s US Restaurant Properties’ chairman and CEO Bob Stetson, US Food Trucks commissary manager Victor Ricano, and USRP CFO Jim Kropp by one of the 27 food trucks that come home every night to the 17k SF building at 7508 Ambassador Row, just off Mockingbird near Hwy 183 and I-35 in Dallas. Snap Kitchen (repped locally by The Weitzman Group’s Michelle Caplan) is wrapping up design for its commercial kitchen in a former office space in the warehouse, Bob tells us.

So far, Snap Kitchen chefs prepare and package individual meals (ready to eat or ready to heat up) throughout the day in a temporary kitchen. Hudson Peters’ Kimberly Lay-Martin (who repped the landlord along with Michelle Hudson) tells us the costs to lease a quality retail space with kitchen facilities is around $35/SF, so consolidating all food prep to a commercial kitchen makes sense cost-wise at about $15/SF here. At the end of the day, Snap Kitchen can maximize premier retail space and streamline production by using the kitchen-only facility, Bob tells us. 

The guys (clearly hard at work in the commissary kitchen) tell us Snap should be ready to move in around Feb. 1, when vans will leave the facility twice per day to deliver to the local stores. Snap Kitchen just opened last month in Preston Royal Village to join locations in Snider Plaza on Hillcrest, and in Uptown on McKinney Avenue. Coming soon are locations to Fitzhugh at U.S. 75 and 4941 Belt Line Rd in Addison. The kitchen is among the common areas (including restrooms and outside wash bays) for the trucks that call the property home. One big selling point for this site: it’s one of fewer than 10 City-approved sites in Dallas for catering companies and for trucks to call home base.

Jim tells us the warehouse space is obsolete for industrial uses because of low ceiling heights. It’s ideal for food trucks and catering companies because of its proximity to several major traffic arteries and the abundance of parking lot space. Bob says he learned about city regulations that mandate each food truck must have access to a commissary kitchen as well as a City-approved site to park the trucks overnight and realized this need was on mission for USRP. The first tenant for USRP was its own affiliated US Food Trucks, which owns 15 food trucks and leases them to vendors. As part of the deal, the renters get access to the commissary, access to ice, the ability to refill the propane in the trucks, and even pull into a wash bay to clean both the inside and outside of the trucks. Jim tells us there’s still almost 7,000 SF available inside the building for one to three commercial kitchen users. Away from biz, Bob enjoys mountain sports in Colorado while Jim is an enthusiastic home chef with a specialization lately in French peasant food.