BB-INT011 — Thomas Hardy

Food truck festival last summer — the big one in the river valley. There were probably forty trucks there. I went with my brother. We tried a bunch of things and the BorderBlend brisket taco was the standout. Not a close call. We went back to the truck twice that day.

The beef. The smoking technique is real — you can taste the difference from something that's just been braised and called brisket. And the combination. The salsa verde cuts through the fat. It's actually thought through. I'm not a chef but I understand when something has been worked on.

I looked them up online — found their website, found the truck locations. There's one about a ten-minute drive from my house that runs on Saturday mornings. I started going. It became a habit.

Two to three times a month. Saturday lunch mostly. Sometimes I'll stop by on a weekday if I'm near a truck during a work site visit.

I signed up for a loyalty card for a coffee place years ago and never used the points because the interface to check them was annoying. I've been sceptical of loyalty programmes since. Unless it's actually easy — like, it tracks automatically and gives me something real without me having to manage it — I'm not interested in another app or card to keep track of.

You scan something when you pay, points accumulate, you get notified when you have enough for something. Done. No separate app download. No account creation before you can buy. Just — it works in the background. Some coffee chains do this now. If BorderBlend had something like that, I'd probably use it passively without changing anything about how I visit.

The location schedule. I know my Saturday truck is usually there, but I've shown up twice and it wasn't there with no notice. I don't follow their social media so I wouldn't see an Instagram story about a schedule change. I just showed up and found an empty spot. I'd probably appreciate a simple text alert — "the truck won't be at [location] this Saturday" — if I opted into something like that. No content, no promotion. Just operational information.

Not that I know of. Maybe on the app. I haven't looked closely.

The plant-based one surprised me. I'm not vegetarian but a friend is, and she came with me once. I tried the plant-based option out of curiosity and it was genuinely good — it didn't feel like a compromise item. That changed my impression of the brand. A food truck that puts the same thought into the plant-based option as the signature item is taking it seriously.

I have. Multiple people at work. My sister-in-law. Usually I describe it the way I experienced it — "you won't expect it to be that good." Low expectations, good outcome. That's actually a reliable recommendation.

Just that the basics are right. Good food, reasonable price, reliable enough. The small friction points — schedule reliability, the loyalty thing — don't outweigh the core product. But if they were fixed, they'd probably make me a more consistent customer.